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Copyright, 1894, by F. Hanfstaengl, Munich.] [From the Painting by Gabriel Max. 



Ancestors of Man 
{Pithecanthropus A lalus). 



\! 



THE STORY OF 



a 



PRIMITIVE" MAN 



BY 



/ 



EDWARD CLODD 

PRESIDENT OF THE FOLK LORE SOCIETY 

AUTHOR OF THE STORY OF CREATION, A PRIMER OF EVOLUTION, 
THE CHILDHOOD OF RELIGIONS, ETC. 



WITH [LLUSTRATIOMS 



MAY 13 ?89 




NEW YORK 

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

1895 



Gc/V74S 

■Vtcf 



Copyright, 1895, 
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. 



SD ebica Ub 

(by permission) 
TO 

SIR JOHN EVANS, 

K. C.B., D. C. L., LL. D., V. P. R.S., ETC., 

WHOSE LABOURS IN 

THE COLLECTION OF EVIDENCE BEARING ON THE 

ANTIQUITY AND PRIMITIVE STATE OF MAN 

HAVE PLACED ALL STUDENTS OF ANTHROPOLOGY 

UNDER LASTING INDEBTEDNESS. 



PREFATORY NOTE. 



The List of Books given at the end of this 
little volume fulfils the twofold purpose of indi- 
cating the authorities who have been consulted 
in its preparation, and of telling the reader where 
fuller information on the several subjects dealt 
with is to be found. 

My special acknowledgments are due both to 
Sir John Evans and Messrs. Longmans and Co. 
for their generous permission of the use of blocks 
from Sir John Evans's "Ancient Stone Imple- 
ments of Great Britain," and " Ancient Bronze Im- 
plements of Great Britain. ,, 

E. C. 

19, Carleton Road, 
Tufnell Park, N. 

February y 1895. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Place of Man in the Earth's Life- 
History . . . .... 9 

II. The Place of Man in the Earth's Time- 
History 20 

III. The Ancient Stone Age ..... 35 

1. Character of Remains found in the Drift . 35 

2. Character of Remains found in Caverns . 42 

IV. The Newer Stone Age 76 

1. General Character of the Newer Stone Age . 82 

2. Remains found in Coast-finds and Shell- 

Mounds ....... 94 

3. Races of the Newer Stone Age ... 96 
4 Earth and Stone Monuments . . . 101 

5. Primitive Ideas about Spirits and an After- 

Life 103 

6. Stone Circles . . . . . .120 

7. Remains found in Lake-Dwellings . . 131 

8. Origin of the Lake-Dwellers . . . 143 

V. The Age of Metals 160 

VI. Conclusion. 179 

Selected List of Books on the Foregoing 

Subjects . 185 

Index . 187 



CHAPTER I. 

THE PLACE OF MAN IN THE EARTH'S LIFE- 
HISTORY. 

In no branch of knowledge has there been 
more rapid advance during the past fifty years 
than in that which deals with the history of so- 
called " primitive " man. A generation or two 
ago, inquiry was rarely pushed beyond the 
sources of information supplied by written docu- 
ments, coins, inscriptions, and such like materials. 
The possible existence of other materials throw- 
ing light on remote ages in which man had 
played a part — ages about which history was 
either silent, or recorded only myths and legends 
— was but here and there recognised. 

Apropos of " antiquarian research " Boswell 
reports Johnson as saying : " All that is really 
known of the ancient state of Britain is contained 
in a few pages. We can know no more than what 
the old writers have told us." That remark 
gauges the high-water level reached a little more 
than a century ago. And yet the evidence which 
Dr. Johnson declared non-existent was beneath 
the soil of his beloved London. Even at the time 
he spoke, there was lying in the Sloane Museum 
a rudely-chipped flint weapon which had been 
found, at the end of the seventeenth century, as- 
sociated with an elephant's tooth "opposite to 
black Mary's near Graves inn lane," in which 



IO 



THE STORY OF " PRIMITIVE " MAN. 



street once lived Johnson. But years passed be- 
fore it was known that these and other unheeded 




Fig. 2. — Flint implement from Gray's Inn Lane {Evans). 



relics epitomised the early history of man and the 
condition of the Thames valley when he and a 
strange group of animals lived there in a dim 
and dateless past. 

Until a few years ago our school histories of 
Britain began with the invasion of Julius Caesar. 
Both these and graver histories were silent about 



PLACE OF MAN IN EARTH'S LIFE-HISTORY. 1 1 

man and his doings before that time. It seemed 
not to occur to the writers to inquire whether the 
"ancient Britons " were the original inhabitants 
of these islands ; and if not, whence they came, 
and who lived here before them ; and if the earlier 
folk had left any remains from which something 
could be known as to their civilised or barbaric 
state. All this is changed, and for the better. A 
new science has been born — the science of man. 
In other words, the same method of inquiry which 
is applied to origins generally is applied to him. 
He stands as an exception no longer : he is in- 
cluded in the universal order. 

The name " pre-historic " has been given to 
the vast period about which written records tell 
us nothing, because it lies outside the horizon of 
history, as we define it. There have been un- 
earthed from ancient river-beds, limestone cav- 
erns, lake-bottoms, and refuse-heaps; from rude 
sepulchres and stone structures an enormous mass 
of relics which reveal to us the story of man dur- 
ing periods when the Continent of Europe stretched 
beyond Great Britain and Ireland into the At- 
lantic, and was joined at more than one point to 
Africa. 

Besides the knowledge gained from these relics 
of man's presence, much has been gathered in re- 
cent years about the blood-relationship of various 
races, and, more than this, about man's place in 
the long chain of life on the globe. Therefore, 
not only has inquiry into his history been carried 
back to periods not to be reckoned by years, but 
he is no longer treated as a being apart from 
other living things. And that is what is meant 
by the science of man which we call " anthro- 
pology." 



12 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

A few elemental facts will help to make clear 
his place in the order and succession of life. 

The material basis and vehicle of life is a 
slimy stuff called " protoplasm," which builds for 
itself a thin-walled cell. Every plant and animal 
is made up of cells, the shape and arrangement 
of which are governed by the work which they 
have to do. The lowest life-forms consist of one 
cell, which does everything ; that is, takes in food 
and air, casts out refuse, and responds to its sur- 
roundings. All life-forms above the lowest con- 
sist of many cells, of which the several parts of 
the body are built up, each part doing its own 
work on the principle of division of labour. The 
one-celled multiply by division ; the lower many- 
celled by the congregation of like cells; the 
higher by the more complex fusion of unlike 
cells, as the sperm-cell of the male with the 
germ-cell of the female, giving rise to a seed or 
egg whence grows offspring resembling the par- 
ents. 

The Vertebrates, or back-boned animals, stand 
at the head of the many-celled ; the Mammals, or 
those that suckle their young, at the head of the 
Vertebrates ; and the order of the Primates (pro- 
nounced Pri-ma-tes, to distinguish them from 
archbishops) at the head of the Mammals. This 
order includes lemurs, monkeys, apes, and man. 
The anthropoid or man-like apes — the gibbon, 
orang-outang, chimpanzee, and gorilla — are man's 
nearest allies. Some of them resemble him more 
in one feature ; some in another. The orang- 
outang has the most human-like brain ; the 
chimpanzee has the most human-like skull ; and 
the more savage gorilla has the most human-like 
feet and hands. Although the bones of a man 

Q 



PLACE OF MAN IN EARTH'S LIFE-HISTORY. 13 

cannot be mistaken for those of an anthropoid 
ape, the skeleton of each, bone for bone, are 
identical. If we compare the skull of a horse 
with a human skull, we find the same number of 
bones. And whether it be man, or ape, or horse, 
depends not on differences in the plan of the 
general skeleton, but in the proportions, as, for 
example, dealing only with the skulls of each, in 
the size of the brain-case and the face. For the 
comparisons of structure make clear that all dif- 
ferences are of degree, not of kind. The lower / 
apes vary more, especially in their brains, from ( 
the highest apes than these differ from man. 

The barest summary of the evidence in proof 
of the descent of all living things from a common 
ancestry is not possible, neither needful, here, 
and it must therefore suffice to say that the com- ^ 
mon descent of man and apes is no longer to be 
doubted. But man is neither the offspring nor 
the brother of the apes ; he is a sort of cousin 
more than "once removed." And the answer to 
the oft-put question, Where is the missing link 
between them? is, There is no missing link; there 
never has been one. As with the likenesses and j 
differences between the apes themselves, so with / 
those between apes and man. The likenesses are I 
explained by descent from a common ancestry ; I 
the differences have slowly arisen in subtle ways. 
. The Primates form the upper branches of the 
life-tree, whose highest branch is man. This top- 
most place has been won by him in virtue of cer- 
tain advantages in his bodily structure, namely, 
his wholly erect posture, his hands, and his organs 
of speech. For, although the impassable gulf be- 
tween man and apes is especially manifest in his 
larger and more deeply furrowed brain, this is 



14 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

more an effect than a cause of the advantages 
just named. That without them there would not 
have been developed such difference of brain a 
brief explanation will show. 

The primary use of limbs is to enable an ani- 
mal to move about in search of food. This is 
accomplished in various ways among the low T er 
life-forms; and, among the Vertebrates, by two 
pairs of limbs. These have been modified in 
various animals for different modes of action, as 
in the fore-limbs of the bat and bird for flight; in 
the flipper of the whale for propelling it through 
the water; and so on. But in these cases, the 
fore-limbs remain organs of locomotion. And 
they remain so among quadrupeds and the man- 
like apes. It is true that the gibbon can walk 
erect, but his gait is waddling and inconstant, his 
habits being arboreal ; and his long arms used in 
his wide leaps from tree to tree. The other big 
apes are only semi-erect. Man alone has acquired 
the wholly upright position which has set his fore- 
limbs entirely free to act as organs for handling, 
grasping, and throwing things. The modification 
of the fingers, enabling them to be opposed singly, 
or all together, to the thumb, and thereby to act 
as hooks or clasps; to form a cuplike palm; to 
grasp things large or small, and thus learn some- 
thing about them ; gave man a perfect organ 
without which he could never have won lordship 
over the earth. And we have but to cripple or 
lose a thumb to realise that in it lies the real 
power of the hand. The prehensile or grasping 
organs of some of the lower animals, as of the 
elephant, monkey, parrot, and opossum, whereby 
they can lay hold of an object and learn some- 
thing of its nature, raises them in the scale of 



PLACE OF MAN IN EARTH'S LIFE-HISTORY. 15 

intelligence ; and when we contrast trunk or claw 
with the human hand, we see what a mighty 
agent this has been in development of brain. 
Obviously the attainment of the erect posture in- 
volved various changes in the structure of man's 
body — as the thickening of the leg bones, the 
flattening of the feet, the curve of the spine, and 
the altered position of the skull as balanced on 
it. In all this there was the making of Man. 
His two-footed and upright posture involved ex- 
change of the tree-life of his ancestors for life on 
the ground, which brought him into new relations 
with his surroundings, and, finally, in the cease- 
less struggle for life which he had to wage, gave 
him the mastery over foes and the wide earth 
itself. That the wholly-erect posture was acquired 
late, speaking relatively, in man's development 
from an ape-like ancestry is shown, among other 
ways, in the crawling of infants for some time 
after birth — which shows the quadrupedal instinct 
— and in the preference we all have for sitting 
down. Among civilised people the great toe is, 
not infrequently, opposable, like the great toe in 
apes; the Chinese can row with it, and the lower 
races use it for grasping. It has been ingeniously 
pointed out that one of the many proofs of man's 
descent from a tree-dwelling ancestry is in his 
behaviour when he is in danger of drowning. He 
acts in the water as if trying to scramble to a 
place of safety, extending his arms above him as 
in climbing. 

Man's acquisition of articulate speech is in 
itself sufficing evidence of his social habits. For 
language is wholly and strictly a social institu- 
tion ; man speaks to impart his thoughts; a soli- 
tary man would not have developed a language, 



l6 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

since the need for it would not have arisen. In 
the degree that animals are gregarious, they are 
higher in the scale — as ants, bees, and wasps 
among insects; dogs, elephants, &c, among mam- 
mals ; and the instincts which led the apes and man 
to their several social ways of life were inherited 
from their common ancestors, and strengthened 
by practice, being, in fact, necessary to their ex- 
istence, and to the successful rearing of their off- 
spring. 

The normal state of every living thing, from 
the lowest plant to the highest animal, is one of 
conflict, and the "weakest go to the w T all." Un- 
like the lion and other beasts of great muscular 
strength, the Primates had no powerful organs of 
attack or defence, and so took to living in trees, 
where their grasping organs stood them in good 
stead. Swiftness of motion was their safety ; the 
need for alertness against wilder and fiercer beasts 
not only quickened their wits, but compelled 
them to unity. Whichever among them possessed 
any favourable variation, no matter how slight, 
in structure of brain or sense-organs or pliability 
of fore-limb, would secure an advantage over less- 
favoured rivals in the common struggle for life, 
and, transmitting their advantages to their off- 
spring, would in the long run wholly distance 
their competitors. Thus may be explained the 
advance of man's progenitors over those of the 
highest apes. But, in the case of both man and 
ape, social bonds were strengthened by the de- 
pendence of their offspring. Among the lower 
animals the offspring are hatched or born fully 
equipped, so that their parents need trouble little 
about them. But among the highest animals the 
offspring, for a longer or shorter period after 



PLACE OF MAN IN EARTH'S LIFE-HISTORY. 17 

birth, are helpless, and dependent on the parents. 
That condition evokes the nurturing care of 
father and mother, as well as the sympathy and 
love which helplessness excites ; hence the devel- 
opment of social relations, which, beginning with 
the family, extend to groups of families out of 
which are formed tribes and nations. The longer 
the infant stage, the more intelligent the animal, 
which explains why babyhood is longer in the 
offspring of man than of apes, and of apes than 
of monkeys. 

We may now, perhaps, better understand the 
causes which impel the development of articulate 
speech — indeed, of inarticulate speech also. For 
the social animals communicate with one another 
by sounds, which convey certain meanings. A 
dog can often understand what we say to him, 
and therefore it is more than probable that he 
can still better understand what a fellow-dog 
means by a certain bark. As between the lan- 
guage of man and the language of animals the 
difference is one of degree; there is no mystery 
in either: the faculty of speech lies in brain and 
larynx, these organs undergoing marked modifi- 
cation in man at a very early period in his his- 
tory. 

Concerning the beginnings of speech, the 
Roman poet Lucretius made a shrewd guess 
when he said, " Nature impelled men to utter 
various sounds of the tongue, and use struck out 
the names of things." For, when we pull words 
to pieces, a very large number are found to have 
their origin in sounds which are imitations of 
natural sounds or instinctive cries, whose cur- 
rency depended on their success in conveying the 
meaning intended by their users. No mystic 
2 



iS THE STORY OF ''PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

bond linked word and thought together; utility 
and convenience alone joined them. Of course, 
grimaces and gestures like those still largely em- 
ployed by both barbaric and demonstrative races, 
played no small supplemental part at the outset. 

While the language of the lower animals re- 
mains at the instinctive stage and is untrans- 
mitted, human speech, in addition to transmission, 
preserves, through the art of writing, the wisdom 
and experience of one generation for the benefit 
of the next, so that each starts where its fore- 
fathers left off, and in turn adds to the garnered 
intellectual wealth of the world. Language thus 
capitalises thought. 

Touching, as is here only possible, but lightly 
on man's equipment in hand, and erect posture, 
and brain-power, perhaps enough has been said to 
show their interplay : bram, as controlling centre, 
guiding the organs to functions without which it 
was unable to develop and store up in its increas- 
ing folds and furrows the power which finally 
overcame the brute forces of nature. 

For the quality of the brain in all animals is 
determined by the number of its furrows and 
creases. The brains of the lower vertebrates, as 
of fishes, are smooth-surfaced as well as small. 
The brain of a monkey is a sort of "skeleton 
map " of the brain of man ; but when we reach 
that of the man-like ape we find " the details more 
and more filled in," while, in weight of brain, the 
difference between the savage and the civilised 
man is far greater than that between the savage 
and the highest ape. Man's brain-development 
is therefore due to his all-round activity ; the 
nerves which ramify throughout the body con- 
veying sensation to the " head centre," which, 



PLACE OF MAN IN EARTH'S LIFE-HISTORY. 19 

packed within its bony case, becomes more puck- 
ered and infolded as the nerves transmit their 
messages to its keeping. But brain, and nerve 
connections, and hand, were all of' small avail, 
lacking tool and weapon ; and it was from the 
moment when man made choice of a sharp pointed 
flint to cut or kill something that his start in civ- 
ilisation began. A little experience taught him 
the value of the hardest materials within reach, 
and there needed no higher degree of adaptive 
intelligence than some of the lower animals ex- 
hibit to shape the materials to his purpose. The 
beaver builds his log-house where neither flood 
nor foe can reach it, cuts long canals, and even 
makes locks where the stream-levels render the 
canals useless. The tailor-bird, with beak as 
needle, sews his nest of leaves with thread twisted 
of spiders' webs and cotton shreds ; the wasp 
chews the wood to pulp whereof it makes its 
nest; the bower-bird builds a love-abode of 
sticks and shells, and flowers and feathers, where 
he and his mate may flirt and dance; and as for 
the ants — well, everybody knows what astound- 
ing perfection in their social life has been reached 
by creatures whose brains are, perhaps, more 
wonderful than the brain of a man ; reached, too, 
ages before he appeared. But all these only 
repeat, never surpass, the skill of their ancestors. 
Some explanation of man's probable place in 
time-history will now follow the account of his 
place in life-history. 



20 



THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 



CHAPTER II. 



THE PLACE OF MAN IN THE EARTH'S TIME- 
HISTORY. 

The rocks which compose the crust of the 
globe are divided, speaking- broadly, into two 
classes: Unstratified, or fire-fused; and Strati- 
fied, or water-laid. The depth to which the for- 
mer and older extend is unknown, but as they 
contain no remains of plants or animals, they tell 
us nothing about the order and relation of life- 
forms. The stratified rocks, which alone reveal 
that, are divided into the following epochs: — 



Primary « 


Estimated 

Depth. 
136,000 ft., or 72.0 


Typical 
Plant. 
Seaweeds & 
Ferns. 


Typical 
Animal. 
Fishes. 


Secondary. . . . 
Tertiary 


25,000 " 13.4 
27,000 " 14.6 


Pines. 

Leaf-bearing 
trees. 


Reptiles. 
Mammals. 


Quaternary ) 
and Recent ) 


500 


Existing Species. 



The shell-bearing, soft-bodied animals, called 
mollusca, have been chosen as the most .useful 
for the purpose of classifying the life-history of 
the globe, because they are more universally dis- 
tributed through strata of every age than any 
other organisms. Hence they have been named 
the " alphabet of palaeontology." 

In accordance therewith the Tertiary Epoch is 
divided into three systems : the Eocene (Gr. eos, 
dawn, and kainos, recent, or new) ; Miocene (Gr. 
tneion, less), or less recent ; and the Pliocene (Gr. 
pleion, more), or more recent. Sometimes the 
Pleistocene (Gr. fileistds, most) otherwise, known 



PLACE OF MAN IN EARTH'S TIME-HISTORY. 2 1 

as the Post-Tertiary, or Quaternary, system, is 
grouped with the Tertiary Epoch. The several 
terms indicate the relative percentages of shells 
found in each system. 

All animals are probably vastly older than 
their earliest known fossil remains, and as far 
back as the Triassic, or oldest system of the 
Secondary Epoch, we find relics of small mam- 
mals of the marsupial or pouched type, like 
opossums and kangaroos. But it is in Eocene 
deposits that remains of quadrupeds, represent- 
ing most of the great mammals now existing, 
first appear. Both in the Old and New World 
— Europe and America being connected in Eo- 
cene times by way of Iceland and Greenland, 
and enjoying a tropical climate — there lived 
lemur-like creatures which had points of resem- 
blance to the hoofed quadrupeds from which are 
descended the horse, rhinoceros, and other odd- 
toed animals ; and the deer, swine, and other 
even-toed animals. It was, therefore, not later 
than this period, when the several orders of 
mammals were in course of development, that 
the ancestors of lemurs, monkeys, anthropoid or 
man-like apes, and of man, appeared. 

The earliest-known fossil anthropoid apes 
have been found in Miocene strata. In Northern 
India these have yielded remains of the chim- 
panzee, and in Western Europe remains of apes 
as large as man ; the Dryopithecus (Gr. drys, an 
oak, and pithekos, an ape), found near oak trunks 
at Saint Gaudrus, in Haute Garonne, and the 
Pliopithecus, an extinct gibbon, at Sansan, in 
Gers. Monkeys also, under a variety of forms, 
were present, and the representatives of living 
genera of mammals abundant. The land-connec- 



2 2 THE STORY OF a PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

tions of the northern hemispheres remained un- 
broken, and the climate, though lowering in tend- 
ency, so warm that water-lilies grew within eight 
degrees of the Pole, and a rich evergreen flora 
flourished throughout high latitudes. 

Man is not, as has been shown already, the 
lineal descendant of his nearest relation, the ape, 
and it therefore follows that the division between 
the two cannot have been later than Miocene 
times. In fact, the evidence points to the diver- 
gence of the branch which includes monkeys and 
anthropoid apes, and of the branch which ends in 
man, about the close of the Eocene, or the begin- 
ning of the Miocene period. The deposits of the 
latter are almost a blank in Britain^ But Miocene 
beds at Thenay, in France, have yielded a few 
relics of supreme interest in some flint flakes, 
which appear to be of artificial workmanship, 
even to bearing traces of splintering by fire. 
Were this last indication certain, their human 
origin would be undoubted. " Worked " flints 
have also been dug from like deposits at Puy 
Courny in Cantal, and near the Tagus, in Portu- 
gal, and there is full warrant for the expectation 
that, as Miocene strata are explored in other 
parts, corresponding relics will come to light. 
Quite lately there have been discovered, in an 
upper Miocene deposit in Further India, some 
chipped flint flakes of undoubted human work- 
manship. The absence or scarcity of the earliest- 
known tokens of man's presence in one limited 1 
area are not evidence against his presence in 
other areas in Miocene times, and the rudely 
shaped flints of the Thenay and Tagus beds be- 
tray the " prentice hand " which must have pre- 
ceded that of the expert workman. Man passed 



PLACE OF MAN IN EARTH'S TIME-HISTORY. 23 

through many intermediate stages of long dura- 
tion ere he became " the foremost in the files of 
time." 

The Pliocene rocks tell us less about him 
than the Miocene. That is, so far as their con- 
tents have been examined — a very important 
qualification. They show great changes in this 
part of the globe in the sinking of the land be- 





Fig. 3. — Flakes from Miocene beds, Yenangyoung, Burma 
(Natural Scie?ice, Nov., 1894). 



tween Norway and Iceland and between Britain 
and Greenland, thus sundering Europe from Amer- 
ica ; in the union of the waters of the Atlantic 
and Arqtic oceans, and of these with the shallow 
North Sea, the area of which was extended. Al- 
though the climate was slowly growing colder, 
tropical plants, as the bamboo and pomegranate, 
flourished in Central Europe. Species of mam- 
mals now living were numerous : elephants and 
apes tenanted the forests, hippopotamuses wal- 



24 THE STORY OF " PRIMITIVE » MAN. 

lowed in the swamps ; the slow rhinoceros roamed 
the prairies, and the swift deer was the prey of 
hyaenas. At the close of the Pliocene period 
the apes had disappeared from Europe, probably 
through the continued cooling of the climate, 
which resulted at last in the long reign of cold 
known as the Glacial Epoch, or the Great Ice 
Age, the causes of which — a change in the shape 
of the earth's orbit, and in the position of its axis 
— are beyond the province of this book to deal 
with. It must here suffice to point out the place 
of the Ice Age in geological history, and to add 
that it probably began 240,000 years ago, and, 
with intermittent periods of milder climates, came 
to an end 80,000 years ago ; that during its great- 
est intensity it swathed the northern hemisphere 
in a winding-sheet of ice to the fiftieth parallel of 
latitude, dinting and rounding its surface, scoring 
the rocks with scratchings which they bear to 
this day, and sweeping away the northern flora, 
never to return. The same mighty agent left the 
world the poorer, from the life standpoint, in the 
destruction of the largest and strongest mammals. 
The Glacial Periods — for there are at least 
three well-marked divisions' — are included in the 
Pleistocene system. The plants and animals of 
the interglacial beds agree in all respects with 
those of non-glacial deposits, the interesting fea- 
ture of both being the commingling of arctic and 
tropical forms, together with the undoubted evi- 
dences of man's presence associated with each. 
Animals, both extinct and living, inhabitants of 
widely separated areas, lived in the same region 
as the warmer and colder spells of climate alter- 
nated. The hippopotamus, rhinoceros, African 
lynx and elephant, lion, and hyaena — showing 



PLACE OF MAN IN EARTH'S TIME-HISTORY. 25 

land connection between Europe and Africa — 
ranged as far north as Yorkshire ; while the rein- 
deer, Arctic fox, woolly-haired rhinoceros, and 
mammoth or woolly-haired elephant, roamed over 
Spain and Italy, and Scotch firs grew as far south 
as the banks of Lake Varese in Lombardy. 

Among the extinct animals the huge mammoth 
deserves passing notice, if only from the associa- 
tion of its remains with relics of man in the valley 
of the Thames. Its name is derived from the 
Tatar mamma, the earth, the natives believing 
that it lived underground, and that its burrowing 
was the cause of earthquakes. The Chinese have 
a legend that it died if it breathed the outer air. 
It had a wide distribution both in time and space, 
ranging over more than half the land-surface of 
the globe, and living from before the first stage 
of the Ice Age to the late Pleistocene period. In 
Siberia, its native home, where it existed in enor- 
mous numbers, not only have its large tusks, 
known as fossil ivory, been extensively used in 
commerce for centuries, but whole and perfectly 
preserved carcasses have been preserved in Na- 
ture's refrigerating chamber, the frozen layer of 
earth which underlies the surface soil of Siberia, 
extending not only beneath the treeless tundra, 
but also under forests and cornfields. In 1846, 
when the summer was unusually warm, a mam- 
moth, standing upright in the place where it had 
been bogged countless ages ago, was thawed out 
of the icebound soil. It will have been noted 
that the materials for tracing the presence and 
movements of man, or of a creature who was 
" little less than " man, and " more than " ape, 
are too scanty and dubious to justify our saying 
positively that he lived in Western Europe before 



26 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

the first Glacial Epoch. The question remains 
open. But, on the theory which all evidence con- 
firms as to the divergence of manlike ape and 
apelike man in the late Eocene or early Miocene 
period, he must have lived somewhere. This 
brings us to the interesting question, In what part 
of the globe did man — Homo sapiens — originate ? 
And to that question there is no answer; only an 
approach to one. 

In the " Descent of Man " Darwin deals with 
the subject very briefly. He says, " It is probable 
that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct 
apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee; 
and, as these two species are n_ow man's nearest 
allies, it is somewhat more probable that our early 
progenitors lived on the African continent than 
elsewhere. But it is useless to speculate on this 
subject." 

In an essay on the " Aryan Question " Huxley 
says that during the Pleistocene period " there is 
no reason to suppose that the genus Homo was 
confined to Europe ; it is much more probable 
that this, like other mammalian genera of that 
period, was spread over a large extent of the sur- 
face of the globe. At that time, in fact, the cli- 
mate of regions nearer the equator must have been 
far more favourable to the human species; and 
it is possible that, under such conditions, it may 
have attained a higher development than in the 
north. As to where the genus Homo originated, 
it is impossible to form even a probable guess. 
During the Miocene epoch one region of the 
present temperate zones would serve as well as 
another." (" Collected Essays," vii. p. 324.) 

In " Darwinism," an "exposition of the theory 
of natural selection," of which he was the hon- 



PLACE OF MAN IN EARTH'S TIME-HISTORY. 27 

ourable and self-effacing co-originator, Wallace 
discusses the "probable birthplace of man" at 
greater length, but his views are too concisely- 
stated to permit abbreviation, especially as they 
include theories on the obscure question of the 
rise of varieties or " races " of man. " It has 
usually been considered that the ancestral form 
of man originated in the tropics, where vegetation 
is most abundant and the climate most equable. 
But there are some important objections to this 
view. The anthropoid apes, as well as most of 
the monkey tribe, are essentially arboreal in their 
structure, whereas the great distinctive character 
of man is his special adaptation to terrestrial 
locomotion. We can hardly suppose, therefore, 
that he originated in a forest region, where fruits 
to be obtained by climbing are the chief vegetable 
food. It is more probable that he began his ex- 
istence on the open plains or high plateaux of the 
temperate or sub-tropical zone, where the seeds 
of indigenous cereals and numerous herbivora, 
rodents, and game-birds, with fishes and molluscs 
in the lakes, rivers, and seas supplied him with an 
abundance of varied food. In such a region he 
would develop skill as a hunter, trapper, or fisher- 
man, and later as a herdsman and cultivator. 

In seeking to determine the particular areas 
in which his earliest traces are likely to be found, 
we are restricted to some portion of the eastern 
hemisphere, where alone the anthropoid apes 
exist, or have apparently ever existed. Triere is 
good reason to believe, also, that Africa must be 
excluded, because it is known to have been sepa- 
rated from the northern continent in early ter- 
tiary times, and to have acquired its existing fauna 
of the higher mammalia by a later union with that 



28 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

continent after the separation from it of Mada- 
gascar, an island which has preserved for us a 
sample, as it were, of the early African mamma- 
lian fauna, from which not only the anthropoid 
apes, but all the. higher quadrumana (or " four- 
handed," so called because the hind-feet can be 
used for grasping) are absent. There remains 
only the great Euro-Asiatic continent; and its 
enormous plateaux, extending from Persia right 
across Tibet and Siberia to Manchuria, afford an 
area some part or other of which probably offered 
suitable conditions in late Miocene or early Plio- 
cene times (it will be seen that Mr. Wallace fa- 
vours a more recent period than the Thenay and 
Indian flints appear to warrant) for the develop- 
ment of ancestral man. " It is in this area that we 
still find that type — the Mongolian — which retains 
a colour of the skin midway between the black or 
brown-black of the negro, and the ruddy or olive- 
white of the Caucasian types, a colour which still 
prevails over all Northern Asia, over the Ameri- 
can , continents, and over much of Polynesia. 
From this primary tint arose, under the influence 
of varied conditions, and probably in correlation 
with constitutional changes adapted to peculiar 
climates, the varied tints which still exist among 
mankind. If the reasoning by which this conclu- 
sion is reached be sound, and all the earlier stages 
of man's development from an animal form oc- 
curred in the area now indicated, we can better 
understand how it is that we have as yet met with 
no traces of the missing links, or even of man's 
existence, during late tertiary times, because no 
part of the world is so entirely unexplored by the 
geologist as this very region. The area in ques- 
tion is sufficiently extensive and varied to admit 



PLACE OF MAN IN EARTH'S TIME-HISTORY. 29 

of primeval man having attained to a considerable 
population, and having developed his full human 
characteristics, both physical and mental, before 
there was any need for him to migrate beyond its 
limits. One of his earliest important migrations 
was probably into Africa, where, spreading west- 
ward, he became modified in colour and hair in 
correlation with physiological changes adapting 
him to the climate of the equatorial lowlands. 
Spreading north-westward into Europe, the moist 
and cool climate led to a modification of an op- 
posite character, and thus may have arisen the 
three great human types which still exist. Some- 
what later, probably, he spread eastward into 
North America and soon scattered himself over 
the whole continent ; and all this rmay well have 
occurred in early or middle Pliocene times. 
Thereafter, at very long intervals, successive 
waves of migration carried him into every part 
of the habitable world, and by conquest and in- 
termixture led ultimately to that puzzling grada- 
tion of types which the ethnologist in vain seeks 
to unravel." 

We may now return to the sure ground as to 
man's presence in Europe in mid-Pleistocene 
times, and through all the climatal and other 
changes which preceded what may be more 
strictly called the Human Period. On the thresh- 
old of this we must stay to learn that the peri- 
ods of time in Europe, from the unknown age of 
man's first appearance there, till about the Chris- 
tian era, have been divided by Danish antiquaries 
into the "Ages" of Stone— sub-divided into the 
Palaeolithic or Ancient Stone Age, and the Neo- 
lithic, or Newer Stone Age; of Copper or Bronze; 
and of Iron. This classification was anticipated 



30 THE STORY OF " PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

by some ancient writers, notably by Lucretius in 
his great poem " De Rerum Natura," in the pas- 
sage thus rendered by Mr. Munro : 

"Arms of old were hands, nails, and teeth, and 
stones, and boughs broken off from the forests, 
and flame and fire, as soon as they had become 
known. Afterwards the force of iron and copper 
was discovered ; and the use of copper was known 
before that of iron, as its nature is easier to work 
and it is found in greater quantity." (V. 1283- 
1288.) 

In the peat deposits of Denmark, which range 
from ten to thirty feet in depth, three distinct 
layers of trees occur. In the lowest beds there 
are found trunks of Scotch fir, which has not been 
a native within historical times, and no longer 
thrives when planted. Near them flint weapons, 
and bones of the stag and primitive ox, were dis- 
covered. At a higher level layers of oak were 
found, and with them some bronze shields, which 
are deposited in the noble Museum of Northern 
Antiquities at Copenhagen. In the uppermost 
beds trunks of the common beech, which still 
flourishes in Denmark, were found. Hence the 
classification. 

By the Stone Age, as the term implies, is under- 
stood a period when metals were unknown, stone 
mainly, but also bone, shell, horn, wood, and 
such-like accessible materials, being used by man 
as tools and w r eapons. 

The implements of the Ancient Stone Age are 
alike in being of the rudest type, and neither 
ground nor polished; only roughly chipped. 
Some are found in the drift, or gravel-beds de- 
posited by ancient rivers ; others, of rather higher 
type, under the floors of limestone caverns. The 



PLACE OF MAN IN EARTH'S TIME-HISTORY. 3 1 

implements of the Nejver Stone Age are usually 
exposed upon or buried near the surface of the 
soil ; they are found among the debris of rubbish- 
heaps or coastfinds, and lake-dwellings; and also 
in earthworks, tombs, etc. They are markedly 
distinct from palaeolithic implements, not only in 
being fashioned of other stones besides flint, of 
which material the older implements, for the most 
part, are shaped, but in exhibiting manufacturing 
skill of a gradually higher order, and in being 
ground to an edge and more or less polished. Of 
course, chipping still went on. Very great dif- 
ferences in the features of Europe, evidencing 
changes stretching over vast periods, mark the 
two Ages, and appear to imply immense intervals 
between them, but the evidence for and against 
this is alike inconclusive. Upon the several 
stages in the shaping of stone implements the 
following quotation from Lubbock's " Pre-historic 
Times " is apposite : 

" A very small step would lead man to the 
application of a sharp stone for cutting. When 
the edge became blunt the stone would be thrown 
away and another chosen, but after a while, acci- 
dent, if not reflection, would show that a round 
stone would crack other stones, and thus the sav- 
age would learn to make sharp-edged stones for 
himself. At first, as we see in the drift specimens, 
these would be coarse and rough, but gradually 
the pieces chipped off wou-fd become smaller, the 
blows would be more cautiously and thoughtfully 
given, and at length it would be found that bet- 
ter work might be done by pressure than by blows. 
From pressure to polishing would again be but 
a small step. In making flint implements sparks 
would be produced; in polishing them it would 



32 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

not fail to be observed that they became hot, and 
in this way it is easy to see how the two methods 
of obtaining fire may have originated," 

The implements of the Copper or Bronze Age, 
when a great advance in human progress was 
made possible by the discovery of metals, were, 
in the earlier period, fashioned of copper, after- 
wards by the happy discovery of hardening it by 
mixing it with tin, of the compound bronze or 
" gunmetal." 

The implements of the Iron Age were made of 
that yet harder and most valuable of all metals, 
which superseded bronze for cutting instruments, 
bronze being still used for the handles, and for 
ornamental purposes. 

No definite dates can be given to these several 
divisions ; the only thing certain is the succession 
of the stages of culture which they imperfectly 
denote. The Great Ice Age gives us a rough- 
and-ready measure of the vast time during which 
man inhabited Western Europe, in the Palaeolithic 
Age. Compared with this, the Neolithic Age, so 
far as indicated by the time taken to form certain 
deposits in which its relics occur, is recent, say 
5,000 b. c. The early Bronze Age may date about 
four thousand years later, merging into the Iron 
Age, references to that metal being found in the 
Homeric poems (about 850 b. c.) and in the 
u Works and Days " of Hesiod, the shepherd-poet, 
who describes the five ages of the world — gold, 
silver, bronze, heroes or demi-gods, and> lastly, 
iron, in which he lives, casting envious glances 
on the heroic times. But the exact figures have 
little importance. The several stages overlap, 
intermingle, and shade off one into the other 
" like the colours of the rainbow." They are not 



PLACE OF MAN IN EARTH'S TIME-HISTORY. 33 

applicable to all parts of the world at one and the 
same time, as if there had been a universal aboli- 
tion of stone tools and weapons at a certain 
period in human history, and a universal adoption 
of bronze tools and weapons in their place. It is 
highly probable that in the Ancient Stone Age 
the whole of Europe may have been inhabited by 
races using chipped and unpolished stone imple- 
ments, but it is certain that in the later part of 
the Newer Stone Age it was occupied by races in 
very varying degrees of civilisation. 

The more fortunate people who had settled in 
Southern Europe were, by contact with older 
peoples who sailed the Mediterranean, far ahead 
of those who were scattered in regions north of 
the Alps. Polished stone implements and, to 
some extent, bronze, which metal was exchanged 
in barter for the coveted amber washed on the 
Baltic shores, were in use among these long after 
iron was known to Greek and Roman. Widely as 
metals are distributed by commerce in the present 
day, barbarous people who make shift with stone 
tools and weapons still exist. But a few years 
ago there perished the last remnants of the 
aborigines of Tasmania, who in many respects 
nearly represented man of the Palaeolithic Age. 
Further, the succession of the later ages is not 
universal, for some races, as in certain parts of 
Africa and Polynesia, passed direct from the use 
of stone to that of iron through the agency of 
traders. Attempts at exact chronological order 
are sometimes hindered by the retention of stone 
implements for ceremonial purposes. For ex- 
ample, the Egyptians, in embalming the bodies of 
their dead, made the first incision in the side of 
the corpse with a stone knife, and references oc- 
3 



34 THE HISTORY OF " PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

cur in the Old Testament' N ^E i x^dus^v. 25 ; Joshua 
v. 2) to the use of the same kind of instrument in 
the rite of circumcision, which, under certain con- 
ditions, is performed to this day with a fragment 
of flint or glass. The Brahman priest still kindles 
the sacrificial flame by the primitive method of 
producing fire — namely, rubbing two pieces of 
wood together till the sparks fly. In the most 
advanced times, in Mexico and Central America, 
the human sacrifice was slain with a stone knife 
on a stone slab, the neck and limbs being held 
down by a sacrificial collar and fetters of chased 
stone. These are a few specimens of abundant 
examples that, when the original purpose of a 
thing is forgotten or mystified, or when the use 
of it is restricted to a class, time and authority 
combine to invest it with sanctity. Dean Stanley 
has shown the operation of this in the case of 
certain vestments. " The alb is but the white 
shirt or tunic, still kept up in the white dress of 
the Pope, which used to be worn by every peasant 
next his skin, and in southern countries was often 
his only garment. The overcoat in the days of 
the Roman Empire, as in ours, was constantly 
changing its fashion and its name. One such 
overcoat was the cape or cope, also called 'pluviale,' 
the 'waterproof.' Another was the casula, the 
* little house,' as the Roman labourer called the 
smock frock in which he shut himself up when 
out at work in bad weather, and which survives 
in the chasuble wherewith the Roman Catholic 
priest decks himself before celebrating mass." 

Our " swallow-tails " are only the old cutaway 
hunting coats, and the now purposeless buttons 
on the back were formerly used to fasten the 
skirts behind when riding. Man is much more a 



THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 35 

bundle of survivals than a " bundle of habits. " 
All our pleasures and our pastimes are the out- 
come of primitive instincts and primitive prac- 
tices. Our waltzes and quadrilles are the lineal 
descendants of barbaric religious dances; our 
conjuring is the comic offspring of tragic arts of 
sorcery ; our plays and horse races are the rep- 
resentatives of dramas and games respectively, 
which were instituted as festivals in honour of the 
gods. Our picnics and campings-out satisfy a 
primitive nomad instinct; our fencing and boxing 
the old fighting instinct; and our "meets" the 
hunting instinct of remote ancestors who killed 
not for their pleasure so much as for their dinners. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 

I. Character of Remains found in the Drift. 
The credit of the discovery of the meaning of 
certain objects found in old river-beds rests with 
a French savant, M. Boucher de Perthes. In 1839 
he called the attention of other men of science to 
the finding of some rudely-shaped flint imple- 
ments in hitherto undisturbed pits which were 
being worked for sand and gravel in the valley 
of the river Somme, near Abbeville, in Picardy. 
They had been found at intervals during preced- 
ing years in such positions, and so far below the 
surface, as to convince him that they were of the 
same date as the deposits in which they were 
buried, and in which were also found bones of the 
mammoth, woolly-haired rhinoceros, and other ex- 



36 



THE STORY OF " PRIMITIVE" MAN. 



tinct mammals. He argued that these " shaped " 
flints had been fashioned by man, and that they 
proved his great antiquity and low stage of 
civilisation. But, when he took his finds to Paris, 
he met with the same scepticism which the Abbe 
Bourgeois encountered thirty years later when he 
exhibited his Thenay flints in the same city. 
English antiquarians and geologists also looked 
askance at the Somme relics, but in 1858-59 their 
doubts were removed by a visit to the beds in 
which the implements were said to have been 
found. " In addition to being perfectly satisfied 

with the evi- 
dence adduced 
as to the nature 
of the discov- 
eries, they had 
the crowning 
satisfaction of 
seeing one of 
the worked 

flints still in situ 
in its undis- 
turbed matrix 
of gravel at a 
depth of 17 feet 
from the origi- 
nal surface of 
the ground." 

All doubt 
being thus re- 
moved, an im- 
petus was given 
to further re- 
search, and not only were discoveries of similar 
implements made in England in beds of gravel, 




Fig. 4. — Hackney Down gravels {Evans). 



THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 



37 



sand, and clay, but it was found that flint im- 
plements — with never a thought as to their deep 




Fig. 5. — Highbury New Park {Evans). 



significance — had been unearthed many years 
ago ; and, like the famous specimen from the 
Thames drift " opposite to black Mary's, near 
Grayes inn lane," put into a glass case, and 
labelled only " curious." London and its neigh- 
qourhood, the old gravel beds of both Thames 
and Lea, have yielded abundant harvest — in short, 



38 THE STORY OF " PRIMITIVE '» MAN. 

"by 'many an ancient river' whose banks and 
course so largely determined the direction of man's 
wanderings, we find the tokens of his presence. 
We may take a run to the village of Caddington, 




Fig. 6. — Ealing Dean {Evans). 



near Dunstable, and noting the ' lakeside living 
place,' where Palaeolithic man settled to work for 
a while, follow the course of the Lea to its junc- 
tion with the Thames at Blackwall ; gather chipped 



THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 



39 



flints en route at Waltham, Edmonton, and Clap- 
ton, in short, all along the ancient clays and 
gravels, till we halt for a moment at Stoke New- 
ington on 'an old surface floor which agrees well 
with the Palaeolithic floor at Caddington.' ' 

Sir John Evans, in his monograph on " Ancient 
Stone Implements" — the standard and scarce 
work on the subject — divides the drift implements 
into three classes : 

i. FlinJLJLakjes, apparently intended for arrow- 
heads or knives. The durability 
of flint, and the ease with which, 
after practice, it can be chipped 
into the required form, caused it 
to be more frequently used than 
any other stone. The flakes are 
removed either by blows or pres- 
sure, and were probably used by 
Palaeolithic man as knives, and 
as scrapers for cleaning the skins 
of animals 

2. Pointed weapons like lance 
or speaFTieads. 

3. Oval or tongue-shaped im- 
plements, presenting a cutting 
edge all round. 

The manufacture of gun-flints 
for export to Africa is still car- 
ried on at Icklingham, in Suffolk, 
and at Brandon, in Norfolk. The 
workmen are few, and, with les- 
sening demand for the flints, de- 
reasing. Son has succeeded fath- 
er through many generations, 
living the sombre, underground life which 
blanches their faces to the colour of their chalk 




Fig. 7.— Flake 

Pressigny {Evans) 



40 THE STORY OF " PRIMITIVE » MAN. 

surroundings. The production, attainable after 
a little practice, of stone implements with the aid 
of rough tools similar to those which the men of 
the Old Stone Age probably used, throws much 
light on the shaping of these earliest works of 
human skill. 

But these cores and flakes and rudely-pointed 
missiles and tools are as like as two peas, and to 
further dilate upon them would invest these pages 
with the interest and charm of a catalogue. It 
suffices to say that there is a general resemblance 
of form between the implements found, not only 
in the river-drifts of southern England and 
France, but, Scandinavia excepted, of Europe, 
Asia, Africa, and America. " Their identity," as 
Boyd Dawkins remarks, " shows that the Palaeo- 




FlG. 8. — Flint core with flakes replaced upon it {Evans). 

lithic man who hunted the arnee (a variety of In- 
dian buffalo) and the extinct hippopotamus in 
the forests of India ; who wandered over Pales- 



THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 4 1 

tine and the valley of the Nile; who hunted the 
wild boar and stag, the mammoth, and, probably, 
the pigmy rhinoceros in the Mediterranean, was 
in the same rude state of civilisation as the hunt- 
er of the reindeer, bison, woolly rhinoceros, and 
horse in the forests of France and Britain." 

It should be explained that the drift is formed 
of alluvial deposits — gravel, sand, clay, and stones 
— brought down by that slow yet ceaseless action 
of rain and flood which is forever deepening the 
bed over which the waters flow. Since the time 
that the men of the Old Stone Age lived in France 
the Somqe has scooped out its valley from 60 to 
100 feet, a result which demands an enormous 
antiquity for the implements found in the gravels 
thus left high and dry, when we take into account 
the almost imperceptible rate at which our rivers 
are lowering their beds. For example, it is esti- 
mated that the Thames (apart from about 450,000 
tons of chalk and other matter carried away an- 
nually in solution) lowers its basin at the rate of 
one foot in 11,700 years; the Boyne one foot in 
6,700 years; the Forth one foot in 3,100 years; 
and the Tay one foot in 1,800 years. 

Britain was still part of the Continent when 
the relics of Palaeolithic man fell 
to the bottom of the Somme. 
There were no Straits of Dover, 
and no English Channel. Lions 
prowled about the Mendips ; 
droves of horses, herds of elk FlG - 9-— F1 int core, 
and reindeer, wild oxen, and ^L™ 
smaller animals roamed over the 
plains now covered by the North Sea. Through 
these there ran a river fed by the several streams 
now known as the Rhine and the Elbe, the Tyne, 




42 THE STORY OF " PRIMITIVE " MAN. 

the Humber, and the Thames. Each tributary, 
deepening its bed as it flowed, entombed therein 
the stone tools and weapons of man, and the 
bones of animals which the smacksmen on the 
Dogger Bank bring up in their nets in countless 
numbers. These fossil remains tell us what brute 
life surrounded man, and what varying climates 
prevailed. 

II. Character of Remains found in Caverns. All 
changes which have taken place in the relative 
position of sea and land have occurred within the 
present continental areas; in other words, the 
deep basins which are filled by the great oceans 
have probably been as they now are from the 
earliest stages in the formation of the crust of the 
globe. But within the limits of change the havoc 
has been enormous; the rain, the atmosphere, and 
the levelling sea working destruction and wiping 
out traces of the past. One among the many evi- 
dences of this is that no caverns are earlier than 
mid-Pleistocene times. From immemorial ages, 
both to man and beast, overhanging cliffs and 
deep recesses in the hill and mountain-side have 
afforded " ready-made " shelters. And it is in 
caverns that, mingled with the bones of extinct 
and extant animals, further abundance of, and, 
compared with the river-drift, far more interest- 
ing, relics of man's presence have been found. 
Caverns generally occur in limestone rock, their 
formation being due to surface water from above, 
which, finding its way through some crack, and 
coming charged with carbonic acid derived from 
the atmosphere and from decayed vegetable 
matter, dissolves the limestone and slowly eats 
out a cavern. Then Nature, ever emptying the 



THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 43 

streams she fills, true to her cyclical action, be- 
gins to choke up the hole she has made. The 
water, as it drips from the roof, deposits on the 
floor particles of lime held in solution, and these 
form the stalagmitic (Gr. stalagmos, a dropping) 
bed, which covers and hermetically seals-up any 
remains that may be lying about. The portions 
of dissolved limestone hanging, icicle-like, from 
the roof, gradually form the stalactitic columns 
which add to the beauty of many caverns. 

A large proportion of the remains found in 
caverns have been swept-in by streams wmich 
once flowed at the same level as the cavern floor, 
the nature of the soil washed-in, and of the bones 
and other relics in it, giving the key to w r ater 
action. Other causes explain the presence of 
objects which are so mixed as to confuse rather 
than instruct, but the greater number of accumu- 
lations can be accounted for only as due to the 
caverns having been used as the feeding-places 
and dwellings of man or animals. The fragments 
of food, and the tools and weapons scattered 
among them, witness to the use of the cavern by 
hunters, while in the crushed bones of small 
animals, commingled with the bones of great 
fleshfeeders, we find the traces of both eater and 
eaten. 

The continued use of caves through long peri- 
ods, and the frequent disturbances of the soil and 
its contents, render the period to which remains 
can be assigned less certain than in the case of 
those in the drift. But wherever bones of man 
and beast, or rude implements, are found to- 
gether under lower beds of undisturbed stalag- 
mite the fact of their high antiquity is assured. 

As with the river-drift and its contents, so one 



44 



THE STORY OF ''PRIMITIVE" MAN. 



cave is, speaking broadly, as good as another for 
the purpose of giving a common idea of the rest. 
Although many other caverns have been explored 
during recent years, the celebrated example 
known as Kent's Hole near Torquay remains one 
of the best specimens of its kind. Entering that 
ancient haunt of man, we find the deposits in this 
order, beginning with the uppermost : 

i. Blocks of limestone, weighing from a few 
pounds to upwards of one hundred tons, which 
have fallen from the roof at various times, and 
become more or less cemented by carbonate of 
lime. 

2. A black muddy mould from three inches to 
a foot in thickness, composed almost entirely of 




Fig. io. — Hammer-stone, Kent's 
cavern {Evans). 



Fig. ii.— Bone needle, 
Kent's cavern (Evans). 



decayed vegetable matter. This is known as the 
Black Mould. 

3. A floor of stalagmite of granular character, 
varying in thickness from three inches to upwards 
of five feet. 

4. A layer composed mainly of charred wood. 
This is about four inches in depth and occurs 
only in one part of the cavern. It is called the 
Black Band. 



THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 



45 



5. A light red loam, called the Cave Earth. 

6. Another stalagmitic floor, but of a crystal- 
line character, twelve feet thick in some places. 

7. Below all these is a dark-red sandy deposit 
free from limestone, called breccia. 

The objects found in the 
black mould are, compara- 
tively speaking, modern, al- 
though belonging to differ- 
ent periods, such as bronze 
knives, fragments of rough- 
ly smelted copper, and Ro- 
man or pre-Roman pottery, 
but associated with stone 
and bone implements. The 
upper bed of stalagmite, the 
black band, and the cave 
earth yielded remains of a 
very mixed group of ani- 
mals : the mammoth, woolly 
rhinoceros, cave lion, cave 
bear, reindeer, Irish elk, 
horse, &c, and numerous 
flint flakes and cores, i. <?., 
nuclei or remnants of flints 
from which flakes have been 
struck off by a blow or by 
pressure. Besides flint t ools 
and flakes, the black band 
ccmTaTned a bone awj^ bone harpoon and needle 
with well-Formed eye. In the caves of the 
Dordogne, in France, the stone implements with 
which the eyes were drilled in the bone needles 
were found. The cave earth was richest of all 
the layers in remains; the lower stalagmite con- 
tained only bones of the fierce cave bear, and in 




Fig. 12. — Lance - shaped 
instrument, Kent's cav- 
ern (Bvans). 



46 



THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 



the breccia there were found associated with re- 
mains of that animal (which included a " worked ' 
fossil tooth) implements of flint 
and chert of much rougher type 
than those in the cave earth. These 
several accumulations represent 
an enormous antiquity for cave- 
man in Western Europe. Until 
seventy years ago, none of them 
had been disturbed since the time 
of their slow deposition ; slow, be- 
cause a stalagmitic floor cannot be 
formed quicker than the limestone 
overhead is dissolved, and the rate 
of that dissolution depends mainly 
on the amount of carbonic acid in 
the water. Air currents and other 
causes also affect the rate of de- 
position. The scribbling of one's 
name on public monuments and 
elsewhere, presumably that the 
"world" may know the momen- 
tous fact of our having visited such 
and such a place, is a senseless 
disfigurement of things, but, 
very rarely, it renders unwit- 
tingly a public service. This 
a certain " Robert Hedges of 
Ireland " did on February 
20th in the year of Revolu- 
tion, 1688. For, entering 
Kent's Hole, he cut his name 
on a boss of stalagmite, and 
a Roman Catholic clergyman, 
the Rev. J. MacEnery, one of 
the first explorers of the cavern, has left on rec 




Fig. 13. — Bone awl, 
Kent's cavern {Evans.) 



THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 47 

ord a description of the appearance of the letters 
in 1825. He says that they are " glazed over 



Fig. 14. — Harpoon Head, Kent's cavern {Evans). 

and partly effaced," a description which still ap- 
plies, although the water has been depositing 
carbonate of limestone on the boss — it being 
vertically beneath a stalactite — for almost sev- 
enty years since his visit. The film which has 
thus accreted in two centuries is about the one- 
twentieth of an inch in thickness. Assuming an 
even rate of deposit, the time demanded for the 
accumulation of the two layers of stalagmite, to 
say nothing of the cave earth between them and 
the breccia or older cave earth below them, is as- 
tounding. But it must suffice to convey the im- 
pression of high antiquity, and leave out figures, 
especially as a similar boss in the Ingleborough 
cave in Yorkshire has grown at the rapid rate of 
.2941 inch per annum, showing that thickness is 
not to be invariably taken as the measure of time. 
The likeness in general type of the imple- 
ments found in the lowest cave deposits to those 
of the river gravels evidences that the caves were 
used as shelters by the drift-men. Then, after 
intervals whose duration is explained by the up- 
per deposits just referred to, the cave-men appear. 
Probably they were descendants of the drift-men, 
and they had certainly reached a somewhat high- 
er state of culture. This is shown in the more 
finished workmanship of their tools and weapons ; 



48 THE STORY OF ''PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

in the greater variety, both of materials and the 
application of them, and in traces of the arts of 
life which occur in the cave deposits. As dis- 
tinguished from the drift-men, who are identified 
with the Mammoth period, they are often spoken 
of as men of the Reindeer period, because, al- 
though the times in which both animals appear 
overlap, the reindeer, as the remains of the hunt- 
ing feasts show, was one of their chief sources of 
food. 

The range of the Palaeolithic cave-dwellers — 
of course not necessarily during the same peiiods 
— was as wide as the habitable globe. Traces of 
their presence occur in caverns from Yorkshire 
to Gibraltar, from France to Syria, and across 
the Pacific to America. But caverns are found 
only in limited areas ; and in the shelterless open 
country and the beast-haunted forest man made 
his hut of earth or boughs, or dug his pit for 
refuge. Along the river-valleys of Western Eu- 
rope and elsewhere great heaps of refuse mark 
the sites of fugitive settlements of which all other 
traces have been long swept away. 

The Abbe Bourgeois argued that the worked 
flints found in the Miocene beds at Thenay bore 
traces of having been fractured by the aid of fire, 
or used as " pot-boilers " for cooking. But the 
evidence is not conclusive, although supported 
by corresponding finds in deposits of sand near 
Orleans, because the flints may have been frac- 
tured by lightning or other natural causes. .Less 
doubtful is the witness of some calcined stones in 
the gravels of Ealing, and certainty attaches to 
the knowledge of fire among the cave-men in the 
ashes, cinders, charred remains, and wholly or 
partly burnt bones amongst the debris. It would 



THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 49 

have been surprising if these people, who had 
certainly reached a stage of culture little, if at 
all, lower than the Fuegians and Tasmanians, had 
been ignorant of an art — one of the oldest inven- 
tions of man — with which no race of savages is 
known to be unacquainted. The original source 
whence man obtained fire, or the occasion which 
suggested its production, have given rise to a mass 
of myth and legend among the unlearned, and to 
much speculation among the learned. It seemed 
to the untutored mind that so mighty an agent in 
the progress of man — without which, indeed, no 
advance beyond the barbaric state was possible — 
must either be the gift of the gods, or have been 
stolen from them by some daring hero — one of 
the great culture-heroes to whom all races trace 
their arts and civilisation. Mysterious alike in 
nature and in origin, no wonder that it became 
the object of widespread worship; symbol of the 
divine, as among the so-called " fire-worshippers," 
the Parsis; and the mystic element whose guard- 
ianship was the prerogative of a sacerdotal caste 
— vestal virgin of Rome; Brahmin; priestess of 
Peru ; or priest of Baal. Reference has been 
made to the Brahmanic production of the sacred 
flame by primitive methods, and if, through any 
neglect of a vestal priestess, the fire in the temple 
went out, a new flame was kindled by friction on 
a consecrated piece of wood. Friction was, of 
course, the earliest mode of its production, either 
by the laborious rubbing of two pieces of dry 
wood together, or by the more commonly used 
fire-drill, consisting of a stick placed in a cavity 
and twirled rapidly between the two hands. All 
other modes of procuring fire are but forms of 
friction based on the observation that motion 



50 THE STORY OF " ^PRIMITIVE " MAN. 

develops heat. Many things would show this, as, 
e. g., the drilling of a hole in a stone, the emission 
of sparks from a stone when struck, the striking 
of a tree by lightning, the rubbing of its branches 
together, or the personal sense of warmth in rub- 
bing the hands. 

As the cave-men had no pottery — such remains 
as occur belonging to the Neolithic Age — they 
must have cooked their meat in savage fashion ; 
that is, either by putting it on a rough spit, or 
direct on glowing embers or red-hot stones, or by 
dropping the stones into water poured into stone 
cavities, or into holes lined with clay or hide, and 
then popping-in the meat when the water boiled. 
This last was the method among the Red Indians 
or " stone-cookers," as they were called, before 
the traders supplied them with earthenware ves- 
sels. About three centuries ago heated stones 
were used in Ireland for warming milk, and within 
the same period meat was cooked in the skin of 
the animal in the Hebrides. The Polynesians 
wrapped the meat in leaves and put it on heated 
stones in a pit, a method which Mr. Romilly saw 
in practice at a cannibal feast in New Ireland ten 
years ago. 

The use of calabashes, coconut-shells, and of 
any other hollow natural object, as the skull or 
horn of an animal, for drinking purposes, is ob- 
vious. The word ".keramic," applied to all fictile 
ware, comes from the Greek keras, which shows 
the use of horns for drinking-cups, evidencing 
what was their original shape and nature. There 
is little doubt that the invention of pottery was 
due to the practice of coating the outside or in- 
side of inflammable vessels, as bowls and baskets, 
gourd rinds, and so on, with clay to protect them 



3 




52 THE STORY OF " PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

from fire. When it was found that the clay not 
only stood the heat, but was baked hard by it, 
the material which it covered was discarded as 
needless. The most primitive ornamentation on 
pottery is made with the finger-nail, and is often 
a rude imitation of the traces left by the basket- 
work or rushes. 

Considering their rude weapons, the cave-men 
were "mighty hunters; " for the mammoth, wool- 
ly-haired rhinoceros, and other huge beasts, were 
their quarry. The reindeer's antlers were con- 
venient daggers, the large pear-shaped flints pow- 
erful missiles, and the spears, tipped with sharply 
pointed stone or bone, were deadly darts. Small 
three-cornered flints from the drift — rough drafts 
of the exquisitely made arrow-heads of the Neo- 
lithic age — imply knowledge of the bow in early 
Palaeolithic times ; the barbed arrows, or spear- 
heads, so commonly found in the caves of France 
being used for fowling, and bone harpoons and 
barbed hooks for fishing. 

While the men were at the chase the women 
" kept house," cooked the food, and made the 
clothing. This consisted of skins of the hunted 
animals — for as yet none were domesticated — 
sewn together by bone needles with threads of 
sinews or intestines. Passing by other dry and 
less needful details in the filling-in of a rough 
sketch, we come to a matter of deeper human in- 
terest in the genuine relics of primitive art found 
in the caves of Perigord and elsewhere in France, 
Belgium, and Switzerland. Here the Reindeer 
men have left "more vivid pictures of their life 
and times than those founded upon implements 
and weapons and the associated animal remains. 
Fortunately for us they employed the intervals of 



3 
o 



r 



o 

o 

3- 
o 

p 




54 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN, 

leisure from the chase in engraving upon bone, 
antler, and, more rarely, on ivory and stone, the 
hunting scenes which most vividly impressed 
themselves upon their memory/' It is in the 




FlG. 17. — Group of reindeer ; scratched on slate, La Madelaine. 

caves of the Dordogne that the most remarkable 
of these examples have been found. Grouping 
them together, without precise reference to place, 
we have in one sketch, cut on a piece of antler, 
a wild ox (urus) feeding, while behind him is a 
creeping man in the act of throwing a spear. In 
another, a naked hunter is also hurling a spear at 
a horse; another shows a group of reindeer, of 
which two are walking and three — probably cap- 
tured — are lying on their backs. In another, 
representing an ibex, " the fragment of antler on 
which it is engraved was probably broken after 
the artist had begun his work, without leaving 
room for the completion of the figure. But the 



THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 55 

proportions are not sacrificed, nor is the animal 
deprived of its hind legs, which are doubled for- 
ward until they touch the under surface of the 
body." One of the most spirited examples is the 
well-known figure of a mammoth scratched on a 
fragment of ivory, in which the artist has faith- 
fully drawn the animal's shaggy ears, long hair, 
and upwardly curved tusks, concealing its feet in 
the high grass which covered them. The preser- 
vation of entire carcasses of this creature, al- 
ready referred to, enables the accuracy of the 
picture to be verified. The list of specimens, in 
which the reindeer is the animal most frequent- 
ly represented, might be considerably length- 
ened, but it suffices to add that the discovery of 
the figure of a horse on a small fragment of rib 
in the Robin Hood cavern has " high value in 
bringing the cave-men of Britain into relation 
with those of France, Belgium, and Switzer- 
land." 

Nothing has yet been said about the remains 
of man himself in skulls and other parts of his 
skeleton. Compared with his imperishable works 
in flint and such like substances, these are ex- 
tremely rare. For this there are sufficing causes. 
There is the fact, to which Sir John Lubbock re- 
fers, that in the gravel-beds of St. Acheul, near 
Amiens, "no trace has ever been found of any animal 
as small as 7?ian" The larger and more solid 
bones of the elephant and rhinoceros, the ox, 
horse, and stag, remain, but every vestige of the 
smaller bones has perished. Not only were Pa- 
laeolithic men widely scattered; their numbers, 
relatively to other animals, were small. Basing 
these on estimates of the proportions among 
hunting tribes, the figures would be about 750 



56 



THE STORY OF " PRIMITIVE" MAN. 



to i ; and allowing for the length of man's life as 
4 to i, it follows that about three thousand skele- 
tons of different animals of the chase would be 
left for one human skeleton. And of man's bones 




Fig. 18. — Sketch of Mammoth on fragment of ivory, La Madelaine. 

the hyaenas would make short work. Then there 
is the dissolving action of certain acids, especially 
in peat, to be taken into account; the floating of 
bodies to the sea; the small area of ground yet 
opened up in which human bones, or the less 
perishable teeth, maybe imbedded; and, not to 
cite more reasons, the areas once occupied by 
man, but now submerged, and therefore inacces- 
sible to research. As bearing on the subject, 
there is the curious result of the draining of the 
Lake of Haarlem some forty.years ago. Although 
a large population had lived on its banks, and al- 
though vessels had been wrecked in it, and naval 
battles fought on it, the engineers found no hu- 
man bones whatever in deposits which had con- 
stituted the bed of the great lake for three cen- 
turies. 



THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 57 

So many of the assumed finds have occurred 
in deposits the period or disturbance of which is 
not beyond question, that reference will be made 
only to a few of the discoveries which are less 
disputed. The river-gravels of the Continent 
have, as yet, yielded no skeleton of man of the 
drift; and those of Great Britain arealike barren. 
Such remains as have been recovered are found 
in the lower deposits of caves, of the use of 
which, as places of sepulture from early to later 
times, there are abundant traces. 

Among the most important discoveries was 
that yielded by the cave of Duruthy, in the West- 
ern Pyrenees, where a crushed human skull and 
some scattered finger-bones were found associated 
with the rudest types of flint implements — flakes 
aid scrapers — all imbedded in a hitherto undis- 
turbed mass, above which was a sepulchral cham- 
ber containing numerous skeletons of the Newer 
Stone Age. Near the Palaeolithic skull was a 
number of perforated teeth of bears and lions, 
lying in such a manner as to prove that they had 
formed part of a necklace. Moreover, the teeth 
are scratched with ornamental designs — barbed 
harpoons, arrow-heads, and the figures of a pike 
and eel, and of a pair of gloves. For man early 
betrayed the love of ornament; and the rouge 
pot, in the shape of oxide of iron, as well as the 
necklace of shells or teeth, have been found in 
cave deposits. The Papuan, who swallows dirt 
and weapons, and decorates himself with coloured 
berries; the dancing Feejeeans (albeit converted 
to Wesleyism), who painted one half of the face 
red, and the other half black ; the Admiralty 
Island natives, who were delighted at being cov- 
ered with stripes of yellow and green paint when 



58 



THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 



they went on board the Challenger ; and the Es- 
quimaux, who wear a stud in the lower lip or 
cheeks, are one with the modern dandy and the 
powdered beauty of to-day in aesthetic descent 
from the ornamented dwellers in Palaeolithic 
caves. 

As to other skulls, one found at Canstadt, near 
Stuttgart, in 1700, but not examined till 135 years 




Fig. 19. — Tatoo on a Maori's face. 



later, was pronounced to be that of a Palaeolithic 
savage. Twenty years before the Duruthy bones 
came to light, skulls had been found in the Nean- 
derthal cave, in Germany, and in a cave at Engis, 
in Belgium. Bones of the mammoth and woolly 
rhinoceros were associated with the Engis crani- 
um, pointing to its great antiquity; but, concern- 



THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 59 

ing both it and the Neanderthal specimen, Huxley 
says that neither of them fills up or lessens the 
structural interval between man and the man-like 
apes. Which is exactly what may be expected, 
since, as shown already, the divergence between 
man and ape occurred at a period remote enough 
to bring about the differences which mark the one 
from the other. The Engis skull is a fair average 
specimen ; " it might have belonged to a philoso- 
pher, or might have contained the thoughtless 
brains of a savage." The Neanderthal bones 
demonstrate the existence of a man whose skull 
may be said to revert somewhere towards the 
pithecoid (ape-like) type. Most of us, probably, 
have met people of whose heads the same might 
be said. 

If conclusive evidence were wanted, the two 
skeletons found in a cave in Spy, in Natnur, in 
1886, appear to supply it. Upon these their dis- 
coverers reported that although they possess a 
greater number of ape-like characters than any 
other race of mankind, " between them and an 
existing anthropoid ape there lies an abyss." 
They add that " the distance which separates the 
man of Spy from the modern anthropoid ape is 
undoubtedly enormous; between the man of Spy 
and the Dryopithecus it is a little less. But we 
must be permitted to point out that if the man of 
the later Quaternary age is the stock whence exist- 
ing races have sprung, he has travelled a very 
long way. From the data now obtained it is per- 
missible to believe that we shall be able to pursue 
the ancestral type of men and the anthropoid apes 
still farther, perhaps as far as the Eocene, and 
even beyond." 

Before we open another chapter of this history 



60 THE STORY OF » PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

it may be well to focus what has been said about 
the races of the Drift and Cave period, and at- 
tempt some picture of them from the vague and 
scattered materials we possess. Help thereto will 
come from knowledge of the condition of savage 
peoples who are still, or were quite recently, in 
the Stone Age. 

It is needful to bear in mind that the term 
" primitive " as applied to man, and, indeed, as 
applied to all higher forms of life, has no scientific 
accuracy ; and is used only for convenience as 
denoting the highest point which our knowledge 
about the type described has reached. The man 
of the river-drift, as has been shown, was the de- 
scendant of a yet more primitive form. 

First, then, as to his body ; next, as to his 
mental faculties ; and, lastly, as to his social life. 

i. Taking the skeletons of Spy as types, Palaeo- 
lithic man was powerfully built, although of short 
or stunted stature, probably about five feet, like 
the Fuegians, Bushmen, Mincopies of the Anda- 
man Islands, and other extant savages. Broad- 
legged, with curved thigh-bones, his walk was 
shambling, as that of the gorilla or of bandy- 
legged persons. His long skull had a low, reced- 
ing forehead with overhanging brows, furnished 
with bushy hair; the nose was flat, the nostrils 
large; the ears somewhat pointed; the big heavy 
jaw " prognathous " or " snouty " ; the canine 
teeth fang-like, and the chin very small and re- 
treating. The skin was probably copper-coloured, 
and largely covered with long, straight hair like 
that of the Ainu of Yezo, the northern island of 
Japan. If the females differed at all from the 
males it was probably only in being of rather 
shorter stature. 



THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 6 1 

2. Mentally, the " ape and tiger " were but 
little subdued in him. His feelings were rarely 
under control ; the impulse of the moment ruled 
his life. " The mind of the child with the strength 
and passion of the man " were blended in him. 
Cunning he was, because he had to live by his 
wits; to kill and, probably, eat his foes, if he 
would not be killed and eaten by them; to fight 
without pause for food for himself, for the mate 
whom he had won, and for the child that she had 
borne him ; the common need and common peril 
strengthening the social life which began in a re- 
moter past. This struggle involved the constant 
exercise of the senses ; hence the sharpening of 
sight and hearing, so that he could see and hear 
things to which the civilised man, dulled by arti- 
ficial aid and by less need for alertness, is both 
deaf and blind. The earth was a telephone, to 
which, instinctively using the "method of Zadig," 
he put his ear and listened to the distant tramp 
of his enemy. With unerring skill he could with 
a stone missile bring down the bird on the wing; 
transfix the fleeting prey with his flint or bone- 
tipped spear; and, diving into the water, bring 
up the fish with a finger in each eye, like the 
South Sea Islanders or the Australians, who will 
dive, spear in hand, and come up with a trans- 
fixed fish. Living only for the day, he had no 
thought for a morrow which might bring starva- 
tion. Beyond his tools and weapons — and these 
often lost or cast away — he had no possessions 
to which to cling; for the wandering hunter has 
no hearth to protect. Outside the little family or 
group there was no pity or sympathy; because 
the enlargement of these comes only as the social 
life widens. 



62 THE STORY OF " PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

With reasoning faculty but little developed 
and centred on bodily needs, such ideas as things 
around suggested to his twilight mind were a tan- 
gle of confusion, contradiction, and bewilderment. 
As he had but the dimmest idea of the relation of 
one thing to another, he could not group them 
under general facts. He knew nothing of the 
causal connection between a person or thing and 
its shadow; between sleep and dreams; between 
a cloud and its reflection in the water; between a 
sound and its echo from the hillside. He saw 
that the sun and stars came and went, that 
the water or big rivers fell and rose, or in the 
case of smaller streams sometimes disappeared 
altogether, and, falling from the sky, filled them 
again. In these and a hundred other events he 
dimly noted the differences which, in the long 
run, lead the mind to comparisons, and thereby 
lay the foundation of knowledge — of the relations 
between things which we call cause and effect. 
But to bring out of this the conception of law and 
order needs more than the experience of one life; 
ages passed before man could correct the first im- 
pressions of his senses and learn the facts about 
his surroundings. " If," as Pfleiderer says, " we 
require whole years to develop abstract ideas in 
the minds of our children, though they have the 
benefit of all their inheritance from the past, 
' which thought for them,' it must have required 
centuries, and even millenniums, for primitive 
man to arrive at the same results/' 

Of course at the lowest stage that we can put 
him, " thinking without knowing that he thought," 
he was picking up knowledge for the advantage 
of all who came after him. Knowledge of the 
haunts and habits of the prey which he sought; 



THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 63 

of the fittest seeds and berries for food ; of the 
times they fruited, and of the soil in which they 
grew; of the elemental differences in things, as 
the sinking of stone and the floating of wood ; of 
the properties of things, their hardness or soft- 
ness ; their sweetness or bitterness; of the 
strangeness of things, as when the struck flint 
emitted sparks that made him think fire dwelt in- 
side it, or that it was alive. Eye and ear and 
brain, thus kept alert, fed the sense of wonder 
which took the oddest shapes, to know which 
gives us the key to those workings of the primi- 
tive mind in which lie the beginnings of science 
and religion ; the slow passage from guesses to 
certainties. For, at the start, man was befooled 
by his senses, and it has taken him, at a cost that 
makes the thoughtful weep, thousands of years to 
escape from the false impressions of things which 
they conveyed. His eyes told him that the earth 
is flat and fixed, and covered in by a dome-like 
vault, across which sun, moon, and stars pass. 
His ear told him that what we know to be the 
echo of our voice was made by mocking spirits, 
who also howled in the wind and roared in the 
thunder — spirits with which his imagination, ruled 
by his fears, peopled everything. For in the 
degree that he was able to reason at all, or to 
compare one thing with another, he saw seem- 
ing likenesses in things most unlike, and so was 
led into all sorts of pitfalls of the mind. Be- 
cause he moved, he looked upon every moving 
thing as alive like himself. Rustling leaves, 
waving grass, rolling stone, swirling water, drift- 
ing cloud, rising; and setting bodies of the sky, 
all, to his thinking, were alive, and full of pas- 
sions and feelings as he was. Or, if not alive 



64 THE STORY OF " PRIMITIVE " MAN. 

themselves, they were controlled by some life. 
Hence arose belief in spirits everywhere ; at the 
.first, baleful and malignant, because in the degree 
that the nature of a thing is unknown or misap- 
prehended, it is dreaded. Knowledge, like love, 
casts out fear. And since fear always magnifies 
the supposed power of that of which we are 
afraid, it is easy to see how stones and trees, 
water and stars, and a heap of other inanimate 
things, came to have offerings and sacrifices made 
to them to appease their anger or win their favour. 
So we may say that with belief in spirits arises 
savage religion, and that in guesses about things 
—real enough to their framers — arises savage 
science; the religion and the science being en- 
tangled and mixed together in the primitive mind. 
In what has been now said we may seem to 
have travelled a long way from the mental stand- 
point of man in the Old Stone Age. For he was 
certainly not in advance of the larger number of 
modern savages whom all travellers agree in re- 
porting not only as listless and incurious, but as 
unable to fix their attention for even a few mo- 
ments on anything out of the common. The dif- 
ficulty in all attempts to define the mental power 
of men so low in the scale is that we cannot put 
ourselves in the place of people whose language 
is made up of jabbers and gestures, who have the 
vaguest idea of a to-morrow, and who cannot 
count beyond three. But the power in man to 
develop into what the highest specimens of his 
kind have become was in him at his lowest, and 
it is needful to keep in mind that we are dealing 
with a series of mental stages in which there is no 
break, but at the lower of which man remained 
for an enormous period. 



THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 



65 



3. Although travellers nowadays buy stone 
implements as curiosities, the Stone Age has not 






Fig. 20. — Stone club, New Britain (Powe/t). 



wholly passed away. The hairy Ainu who, like 
the filthy Hottentots, never wash themselves from 
birth till death, use bone and bamboo arrow-points 
in hunting and fishing, and live on raw flesh, sea- 

5 



66 



THE STORY OF " PRIMITIVE" MAN. 



weeds and roots. They have no marriage cus- 
toms, a man taking as many wives as he can af- 
ford. The natives of New Britain, until the quite 

recent introduction of iron 
by white traders, used 
stone tomahawks wedged 
between two pieces of 
wood, and tipped their 
spears with the bone of a 
slain enemy so that his 
power might be added to 
their own in hurling the 
weapon. The cannibal 
races of Queensland use 
wood for most of their 
weapons, but have toma- 
hawks of basalt or other 
hard stone, using sharp- 
edged implements 
to rip open the 
carcase of the ani- 
mals killed. They 
also eat beetles, 
grubs, and vermin. 
Amongst the Me- 
lanesians the adzes 
on one group of 
islands are of 
^stone, on the other 
group they are 
made of the giant 
clam shell : their 
spears are armed with bone points. The Nicara- 
guan Indians fix their stone hatchets in stone- 
cut wooden handles. The Tasmanians, who in 
many respects most nearly represented the pre- 




FiG. 21. — Shell adze, Torres Islands 
{Codrington). 



THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 67 

sumed general condition of Palaeolithic man, and 
the extinction of whom is a reproach to " civil- 
ised " people, used weapons of chert of the rud- 
est make, which they 
grasped with their 
hands, being ignorant 
of the mode of hafting 
them. Their 
canoes were a 
float or raft 
of bark bun- 
dles which was 
propelled by a 
pole ; they 
lived under 

bough shelters, and made fire with 
the simplest and perhaps oldest of 
all inventions, the fire-drill. They 
drew rude pictures on bark, were 
quick and cunning in their own 
sphere, but stupid outside it. In 
their crude religious ideas they con- 
ceived of the shadow of anything 
as its ghost ; the echo was the " talk- 
ing shadow," and they believed in 
evil spirits. They buried their dead 
and avoided their graves, a custom 
which, as will be shown presently, 
indicates fear of the ghost. 

These few examples, taken hap- *} G - c 22, r^ h ?!i 

1 i«ii 111 1 adze, banta Cruz 

hazard, might be extended, but they {Codrington). 
supply sufficing material to fill up 
some gaps in our sketch. Man in the Ancient 
Stone Age was in the hunter stage of culture, 
but without any domesticated animal as his help. 
His temporary homes depended upon seasons 




6S 



THE STORY OF " PRIMITIVE" MAN. 



and places: the Veddahs of Ceylon make their 
huts of boughs and bark; the Hottentots use 
sticks and mats; the Esquimaux in summer-time 
stretch skins upon bones lashed together to make 
posts ; in winter they build huts of wood or drift 
timber ; the wretched Fuegians sleep on the un- 
sheltered ground, and the Bushmen, when away 




Fig. 23.— Native house, Teste Island, New Guinea {Powell), 



from their caves on hunting excursions, bury them- 
selves in the sand, broadly speaking; for the no- 
mad the tent or the cave, from either of which he 
shifts easily ; for the tiller, the settled homestead 
As with shelter, so with clothing; climate and 
zone rule that. Nakedness is not necessarily im- 
modesty, and the gift of clothing to a savage peo- 



THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 



69 



pie has sometimes been their ruin. Different 
races cover different parts of the body ; in the 
East women conceal their faces, and a strict Mos- 
lem would be shocked at the bare neck and shoul- 
ders of Western women in evening dress. The 
simplest form of clothing among natives of warm 




Fig. 24. — Esquimaux winter hut (native drawing). {From Rink's 
Tales of the Esquimaux.) 



climates consists of leaves or twigs, or pendant 
strips or fringes round a girdle; in colder climates 
the skins of slain animals are the primitive dress. 
The delight of the savage in a painted or otherwise 
decorated skin has been already referred to. And 
this leads to the interesting parallels to the art of 
the cave-men furnished by other savages than the 
Tasmanians. The " black fellows" of Australia 
rank low in the scale, but they have depicted sharks, 
porpoises, lizards, weapons, and canoes on the 
faces of rocks; and on " grave " pillars have 



7o 



THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 



sketched the boilyas, or ghosts of dead men and 
animals. The Bushmen have also painted figures 
in red, brown, and other col- 
ours on cliffs, or etched them 
in light tints on a dark 
ground ; and the drawings of 
North American tribes on 
stone and bark rank high in 
savage art. 



The beginnings of social 
life go back to a time be- 
fore man and monkey had 
branched off from their com- 
mon stem, and whether or 
not our prehuman ancestor 
had a special pairing season, 
man, as we know him, paired 
at all seasons of the year, 
and remained faithful to his 
mate as food-winner and pro- 
tector, at least during the in- 
fancy of the offspring. Even 
the anthropoid apes do that, 
and in man, as the germs of 
sympathy on which family 
life depends developed, and 
as the period of infancy of 
the offspring was lengthened, 
there was cultivated the deep- 
er social feeling. Thus loose 
and fitful relations tended to 
become lasting. But that 
advance was slow ; among 
a wandering hunting tribe 
are an encumbrance, conse- 




Fig. 25.— An Australian 
gravestone. 

" useless mouths " 



3 
3 



w 

c 

w 

3 

p 

EL 

>d 
p 
5' 

3* 




72 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

quently infanticide, especially of females and puny 
or sick children, was largely practised, and a 
blow with a stone axe settled the fate of many 
an aged burden, the dead being probably left 
to be devoured by hyaenas and other wild beasts. 
There is no trustworthy clue to the mode of dis- 
posal of his dead by Palaeolithic man; the relics 
of funeral feasts which point to cannibalism — 
broken skulls and human bones split to extract 
the marrow— are in early neolithic deposits ; and 
perhaps he was on a level with the cave-dwellers 
by the Red Sea, of whom Diodorus Siculus tells 
as "mocking at all manner of sepultures, for as 
soon as any of them is dead, they tie his head be- 
tweene his legs with a withe of hawthorne or wil- 
low, and dragging the corpse to the highest place 
they can finde, with laughter and jeering, they 
overwhelme it with stones, and then putting a 
goat's horn on the top of the stones, they leave 
it there without any pitty or compassion at all." 

The weeding-out process which man, in all 
stages of civilisation — whether savage of the 
Stone Age, barbaric Gaul, cultivated Greek or 
Roman — has carried out, and which still prevails 
among a large portion of the human race, has 
been aided by the continuous action of " natural 
selection." That action, it is almost needless to 
say, is involved in the tendency of all species to 
multiply beyond the means of subsistence; and 
in the variations, for the most part slight, of off- 
spring from their parents. The first cause gives 
rise to ceaseless struggle for existence among all 
living things, for, as Darwin points out, u even 
slow-breeding man has doubled in twenty-five 
years, and at this rate in less than a thousand 
years there would literally not be standing-room 



THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 



73 



for his progeny." And in this struggle the de- 
structive agencies of nature intervene. They 
who win in the merciless competition do so in 




Fig. 27. — Paintings on a Crow (North American Indian) robe 
{Cat tin). 

virtue of some favourable variation which the 
vanquished lack; for the race is to the swift, and 



74 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

the victory to the strong. But exception to the 
unchecked action of natural selection arises in 
man at a certain stage — necessarily a high one — 
of his development as a social being. His asso- 
ciation into civilised groups enlarges the sympa- 
thetic feelings and, as one among other results, 
brings to no mean state of perfection, faculties, 
as the mathematical and musical, the development 
of which is not due to " natural selection, " or to 
the struggle between man and man. But this 
matter, apart from the obscurity which veils it, 
veiling also the processes which result in what is 
called " genius," lies outside our limits, and it 
suffices to say that when a certain point is 
reached in social evolution, the old conditions 
reassert their power, and the truce to the strug- 
gle ends. 

Perhaps enough material has been collected 
together to set the Ancient Stone Age men be- 
fore the mind's eye as gathered into wandering 
tribes dependent for food on the chase : camping- 
out by the river-side under trees, or dwelling in 
huts built of branches, and resorting, as need 
arose or vicinity permitted, to the protection of 
cavern and rock-shelter. With the barbed spears 
and arrows they caught fish and shot fowl ; with 
the more ponderous stone weapons they slew 
bigger game : mammoth, bison, rhinoceros, rein- 
deer, and horse. The flesh, cut into pieces with 
flint knives, was cooked in vessels of wood or 
skin, into which were dropped hot stones as " pot- 
boilers." The bones were split for the marrow. 
The skins, scraped with flints, and sewn with bone 
needles threaded with sinew, covered the bodies 
against the often severe cold; even the hands, as 



THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 75 

portraits from the Pyrenees caves show, being 
protected with long gloves. The few and graphic 
touches in which Tacitus describes the Fennic (or 
Finnish) tribes may be applied to the earlier folk 
of drift and cave. " They are wonderfully sav- 
age, and miserably poor. Neither arms nor 
homes have they ; their clothing is skins, their 
bed the earth. Their arrows, for want of iron, 
are tipped with bone. The women live by hunt- 
ing, just like the men ; for they accompany the 
men in their wanderings, and demand a share of 
the prey. And they have no other refuge for 
their little children against wild beasts or storms 
than to cover them up in a nest of interlacing 
boughs. Such are the homes of the young; such 
the resting-place of the old. Yet they count this 
greater happiness than groaning over field labour, 
toiling at building, and poising the fortunes of 
themselves and others between hope and fear. 
Heedless of men, heedless of gods, they have 
attained that hardest of results, the not needing 
so much as a wish," or, as it may also be trans- 
lated, they " are beyond the need of prayer." 

The scarcity of human bones in the Ancient 
Stone Age is of minor importance in presence of 
the proofs of man's tenancy of the globe during 
an enormous period, and at a low stage — indeed, 
the lowest stage — of culture. For the tools and 
weapons of drift and cavern are products of 
human skill ; they have defined purposeful shapes ; 
they evidence selection on the part of their mak- 
ers, since they cannot be fashioned from every 
kind of flint. They are found, in striking corre- 
spondence of form, wherever man is known, or 
may be presumed, to have wandered over the 



j6 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

earth, the extremes of the northern hemisphere 
excepted — in the alluvials of the East, the laterite 
or brick-earth of Madras; the river-gravels of 
sacred and classic lands ; by the Sea of Galilee, 
and along the valley of the Tiber — in brief, in 
welinigh every explored part of the world " from 
China to Peru." 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE NEWER STONE AGE. 

Although this division is retained for con- 
venience, it is more than probable that no hard 
and fast line can be drawn between the two Stone 
Ages. Stress is laid in most treatises on the sub- 
ject upon the immense interval which separates 
the periods. The evidence of this is based on the 
different conditions, as the changes of climate; 
the altered distribution of land and water ; the 
disappearance of old species of plants and ani- 
mals, and the appearance of new species. 

In the Neolithic Age Great Britain and Ireland 
no longer formed part of the continent. The val- 
leys that had united those islands and the main- 
land had become submerged, a change which only 
a vast lapse of time brought about. The outlines 
of the map of Europe presented nearly the same 
features as at present. The area of the Mediter- 
ranean had sunk, separating Europe from Africa, 
the higher ground remaining as islands which are 
left like fragments of a sunken bridge. The big 
mammals, as the woolly rhinoceros and mammoth, 
were extinct; others had retreated to more north- 
ern and southern latitudes ; the musk sheep to 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 



77 



arctic zones; the lion, hippopotamus, and lynx 
to tropical zones. The animals found associated 
with Neolithic man represented — some survivals, 
as the Irish elk, wild ox, wild boar excepted — 
species familiar to us. While the stone relics of 




Fig. 28. — Polished oval 
celt, Whit well, York- 
shire {Evans). 



FlG. 29. — Polished celt (with cavity on 
each side for the finger), Duggle- 
by, Yorkshire (Evans). 



Palcoolithie-tJfHes are found underground T A n an- 
cient river-gravels and in " caves and dens of the 
earth"; thogp of Neo^ifhi r tim^c *re. above ground^ 
or at slight depth ; in surface remains, cave floors, 
camps, rubbish heaps, pile-dwellings, tumuli, and 
other burial-places. And while long and inter- 



73 



THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 



mittent breaks appear to disturb the sequence of 
man's presence, at least in Europe, beyond the 
period of the cave-dwellers, his history, from the 
unknown time of the appearance of the earliest 

Neolithic people, is 
continuous to the 
present day. But, 
notwithstanding the 
enormous gap caused 
by the period during 
which the subsidence 
of land beneath the 
sea was going on, 





FlG. 30.— Polished celt, Coton, 
Cambridge {Evans). 



Fig. 31. — Celt from gravel- 
pit, near Malton, York- 
shire {Evans). 



there is evidence which points to a continuous 
occupation of the British Isles, and of Europe 
and Asia, by the same race who gradually ad- 
vanced in stages of culture, and who adopted the 
civilisation of somewhat higher races as this 
reached them by peaceful intercourse. 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 



79 



So that, weighing one thing with another, the 
balance tilts in favour of fusion between Palaeo- 
lithic and Neolithic Ages. Not only are there 




Fig. 33.— Polished celt and 
original handle, Cum- 
berland {Evans). 

abundant types of 
tools and weapons 
that are intermediate 
in character ; but the 
oldest forms of cop- 
per and bronze im- 
plements are mod- 
elled on the patterns 
of the earlier stone 
and bone implements. 
And although changes 
brought about the ex- 
tinction or migration of the older fauna, those of 



Fig. 32. — Polished celt, Guernsey 
{Evans). 



80 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

the newer period may be survivors of animals who 
were contemporaries of the chipped flint workers 




Fig. 35. — Axe in 

sta^'s-horn socket, 
FlG. 34. — Perforated axe, Hunmanby, concise, L. of Neu- 

Yorkshire {Evans). chatel {Evans). 

of the Somme valley. The remains found in the 
cave of Duruthy show transition between the ages 
of ground and unground implements, as do like 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 



81 




Fig. 36. — Axe-head, 
Potter Brompton 
Wold {Evans). 




Fig. 37. — Perforated hammer, Scar- 
borough {Evans). 




Fig. 38. — Hammer-stone, 
Helmsley, Yorkshire 

(Evans). 
6 




Fig. 39. — Perforated hammer, 
Shetland {Evans). 



82 



THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 



\ 



finds in the river-gravels of Sussex; and discov- 
eries of a corresponding kind may be expected as 
researches are carried on. 

The supporters of the 
theory of continuity have 
suggested the name " Mio- 
lithic " or " Mesolithic " for 
the connecting period. 

I. General character 
the Newer Stone Age 
Implements. As ob- 
served above, Neolith- 
ic implements do not 
occur in deep-lying or 
sealed-up deposits like- 
stalagmitic beds, 
but either on the 
surface or very 
near it. Where 
the soil has 
been used only 
for tillage or 
pasture, it has 
been but su- 
perficially dis- 
turbed ; where 
it is rocky and 
barren it has 
often not been 
disturbed at 
all. Consequently, an 
enormous number of 
implements either meet the eye or are turned up 
by plough and harrow, or uncovered by the ac- 
tion of rain. As recollection of a Stone Age died 
away, they have been looked upon with venera- 




THE NEWER STONE AGE. 



83 



tion, and have given support to a mass of crude 
ideas and superstitions, about which more pres- 
ently. The most common form of Neolithic im- 
plements is that known as the celt, probably so 





Fig. 41. — Narrow adze, or pick, 
Burwell, Cambridge {Evans). 



Fig. 42. — Flake saw, Wil- 
lerby Wold, Yorkshire 

{Evans). 



called from the Latin ce/tis, or celtes, a chisel. 
The shape of this instrument is generally that 
of a flat blade, approaching an oval in section, 
with the sides more or less straight, and with 



&* THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" 



MAN. 




Fig. 43, — Borer,, 
Yorkshire Wolds 

{Evans) „ 





Fig. 45.— Carved 

knife, Fimber, 

Yorkshire, 



Fig. 44.— Knife, Ford",, 

Northumberland 

{Evans), 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 



85 




one end broader and also sharper than the other. 

The length varies from two to sixteen inches, and 
the stone of which celts are made 
varies according to the kind most 
accessible. A representative set of 
Neolithic implements would com- 
prise, in addition to the celts , _stone 
tools allied to picks, small hand- 
chisels and gauges, 
perforated axes, some 
sharp at the end, 
others shaped like 
^zeSj^sawj, hammers 
and hammer - stones, 
grinding stones, 

querns, sink - stones 
for nets, whetstones, 
scrapers, borers, awjs, 

Fig. 46.— Lance- drills, and knives, 
inton The purposes to 

which these would be 

applied are as num- 
erous as the needs of man. Mod- 
ern savages use like tools for cut- 
ting timber, scooping out canoes, 
dressing posts for huts, grubbing 
up roots, killing animals, and scrap- 
ing the flesh from their bones. 
Then there are the implements re- 
quired for domestic purposes, 
while for war and the chase there 
were daggers, javelin-heads, sling- 
stones, bolts, lance and arrow-heads, some of 
these last of exceeding beauty and finish. Bone 
lance-heads, pins and needles, were also used, 
and staghorn was made into hammers and axes. 



Moor, York- 
shire (Bvansj. 




Fig. 47. — Knife, 
Saffron Walden 

{Evans). 



S6 



THE STORY OF " PRIMITIVE" MAN. 



The women's spindle-whorls were of stone, and 
their personal ornaments, the simplest form of 
which was the button or stud, were of jet, shale, 




Fig. 48. — Dagger, Thames 

{Evans). 



Fig. 49. — Notched spear-head, 
Burnt Fen, Ely (Evans). 



and amber. The antiquities thus briefly summa- 
rised occur in the upper layers of cave-deposits, in 
peat bogs, coast-finds, refuse-heaps, and pile- 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 



87 



dwellings; in tumuli, barrows, and various stone 
structures, as cromlechs, dolmens, &c, scattered 
over the world. 





Fig. 50. — Indian 

axe from the 

Rio Frio, Texas. 



Fig. 51. — Flint knife, Australia (Evans). 

The superstitions just referred 
to have gathered round celts, 
which are known among rustics 
as "thunderbolts " or "thunder 
axes " ; round arrow-heads, or 
"elf-shot"; and round spindle- 
whorls, called "fairy-millstones" 
and "pixy's grindstones" by Brit- 
ish peasantry. For ages it was a 
belief shared by the learned and 
unlearned that with the flash of 
lightning there fell a solid body, 
which is called the thunderbolt or 
thunder-stone, as expressed in the 
dirge in " Cymbeline "-r— 

" Fear no more the lightning flash 
Nor the all-dreaded thunderstone"; 

and it is these Neolithic relics — 



88 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

axes and arrow-heads — to which celestial origin 
has been assigned. They were known to both 
Greeks and Romans, as they are to the Indians 
of Nicaragua, as thunderbolts; the Germans and 



Fig. 52. — Esquimaux scraper {Evans). 

Scandinavians called them Trior's hammers, and 
both among them and other European peoples 
they were credited with miraculous powers in 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 89 

healing the sick and warding off the dire effects 
of the evil eye. The natives of the Gold Coast, 
when finding them on the ground after heavy 
rains have washed them out of the soil, use them 
as medicine by scraping the dust from them into 

water, and laying 
them in places sa- 
cred to the gods. In 
Brittany the travel- 
ling umbrella-mender 
asks on his rounds 
for pier res de tonnerre, 
and takes them in 
payment for repairs. 
In India they are 




valued as charms 
whose possession 
brings good luck to 
their owner, and 
whose loss is the 
signal of his ill-for- 
tune. 

The arrow-heads 
Fig. 53.— War axe, Noctka Sound are also called elf- 
(Bvans). ghot and elf . ston e S 

by the country folk of Britain and Ireland, in 
out-of-the way places, it being their belief that 
these flint weapons were shot by the elves, or 
fairies, at men and cattle. Thus Robert Gor- 
don, of Straloch, an accomplished country gentle- 



9° 



THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 



man of the north of Scotland, writing in 1654, tells 
how one of his friends, travelling on horseback, 




Fig. 54. — Javelin, Barrow, 
near Stonehenge {Evans). 



Fig. 56. — Arrow-head, 
Bridlington (Evans). 



found an elf-bolt in the top of his boot, and how 
a gentlewoman of his acquaintance, when out 
riding, found one in the breast of her habit. 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 



9 1 



These "elf-bolts" were often mounted in silver, 
and worn as charms against poison and witch- 




Fig. 57.— 

Stemmed 

arrow-head, 

Yorkshire 

Wolds. 



Fig. 58. — Stemmed arrow-head, 
Yorkshire Wolds {Evans). 






Fig. 59. — Stemmed 
arrow-head, Iwerne 
Minster, Dorset- 
shire. 




Fig. 60.— Barbed arrow-heads, Yorkshire Wolds {Evans), 



9 2 



THE STORY OF " PRIMITIVE " MAN. 



craft; sometimes they had a hole drilled through 
them, so that they might be dipped in water and 
endow it with healing virtues. It is a popular 
belief in the Highlands that when cattle are sick 




Fig. 61.— Spindle 

whorl, Scampston, 

Yorkshire. 




Fig. 62. — Spindle whorl, 
Holyhead {Evans). 



Fig 




Jet button, Crawford Moor, Lanarkshire {Evans). 



they have been struck by an elf-dart, and the 
quack doctor, feeling the animal all over, pro- 
duces the magic weapon as if found in the skin, 
as the " medicine man " among barbaric folk, in 
curing the toothache, always extracts a worm to 
the satisfaction of the patient. Then the elf-dart 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 93 

is put into water, which is given to the animal, 
and, of course, a cure effected. Sir John Evans 
quotes from Pitcairn's "Criminal Trials" the de- 
scription of a cavern where the arch-fiend carries 
on the manufacture of elf-arrows with the help of 
his attendant imps, who rough-hewed them for 
him to finish; and also cites from Wilson's " Pre- 
Historic Annals of Scotland " a letter from one 
Dr. Hickes to the famous diarist, Pepys, " record- 
ing that my Lord Tarbut, or some other lord, did 
produce one of these elf-darts, which one of his 
tenants or neighbours took out of the heart of 
one of his cattle that had died of an usual death " 
(sic). Dr. Hickes had another strange story, but 




Fig. 64. — Necklace of jet, studded with minute spots of gold. 
Found in urn within barrow, Assynt, Ross-shire {Evans). 

very well attested (!), "of an elf-arrow that was 
shot at a venerable Irish bishop by an evil spirit, 
in a terrible noise louder than thunder, which 
shaked the house where the bishop was/' Bosnian 
peasants wear them in necklaces as charms, and 
the long range of this superstition is seen in the 



94 



THE STORY OF « PRIMITIVE " MAN. 



flint arrow- heads sometimes forming the central 
pendant of necklaces found in Etruscan tombs, 
and, among the Greeks and Romans, adorning the 





Fig. 65.— Elf-shot. 



(Worn by an old Scottish lady for half a 
century.) 



diadems of their gods. The Italian peasants keep 
flint arrow-heads to preserve their houses from 
lightning, and in some instances carry them about 
their persons as amulets. The miniature arrow- 
heads of cornelian worn by the Arabs of North 
Africa and other people as charms, or as good for 
the blood, have assumed the shape of a heart, 
and thus become symbols of love. So abundant 
and world-wide are the examples from which this 
haphazard selection is made, that the rest of the 
book might be filled with them. But it will be 
seen presently that they are nearly related to that 
adoration of stones as objects of worship which 
has been a prominent feature of barbaric religion. 
II. Remains found in Coast-finds and Shell 
Mounds. Turning now to the relics of earliest 
Neolithic, or, perhaps, Mesolithic deposits, these 
are found in accumulations of rudely worked flints 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 95 

lying near the sea-shore in various parts of the 
world. They are known as coast-finds, and, judg- 
ing from the character of the chips, were proba- 
bly workshops. For the manufacture of imple- 
ments in selected spots must have become a con- 
siderable industry, as men multiplied and, perhaps, 
divided the labour of chipping flints from the la- 
bour of using them. 

But of more importance than these are the ref- 
use-heaps known as kjokken-moddings, or "kitch- 
en-middings," once mistaken for natural forma- 
tions in the shape of raised beaches, but since dis- 
covered to be the sites of ancient fishing and hunt- 
ing settlements. They are mounds of various size, 
sometimes one thousand feet long, and two to 
three hundred feet wide, and are composed of 
castaway refuse — myriads of oyster and other 
shells ; bones of the stag, roedeer, dog, and other 
animals still extant; of wild duck, w T ild swan, 
caper-cailzie, and other familiar birds ; of cod, her- 
ring, flounder, and other deep-sea fish. All the 
marrow-yielding bones had been split open. Be- 
sides these, the surer tokens of man's presence 
were found in implements of stone, bone, and 
wood, and — what marks the chief distinction be- 
tween Palaeolithic and Neolithic remains — some 
rude pottery. Some charred wood and burnt sub- 
stance of a sea-plant, which perhaps yielded salt, 
were found, but there were no traces of any grain. 
The stone implements comprised axes, flakes, 
hammers, awls, lance-heads, sling-stones — gener- 
ally of rude type. The absence of bones of any 
other domesticated animal makes the remains of 
the dog — without doubt, the earliest animal tamed 
by man — highly interesting as marking the ap- 
proach to a settled kind of life. Professor Steen- 



96 THE STORY OF « PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

strup proved this domestication of the dog, the 
conversion of " the brother of the wolf into the 
guardian of the flock," by an ingenious experiment. 
He noticed that nearly all the long bones of the 
animals taken from the mounds were reduced to 
their shaft, and that the heads were irregularly 
broken. He then experimented with dogs, and 
found that they gnawed the heads of the long 
bones, and rejected the hard and solid shafts. 
The bones of deep sea fish show that these rude 
colonies of fishers and hunters had probably ven- 
tured on the ocean ; perchance sons of 

" the first that ever burst into that silent sea " ; 

in " dug-outs " furnished with nets of twisted bark, 
or of bast, or some other fibrous plant. 

The larger number of kitchen-middings in 
Denmark follow the present or former coast- 
lines; but some of them are inland, evidencing 
the advance of the land on the sea since their 
abandonment, which involves their very high an- 
tiquity. Moreover, the oyster, save in stunted 
form, has practically disappeared from the Baltic 
waters, owing to their having changed from salt 
to brackish. This shows that Denmark was for- 
merly more intersected with fjords or narrow 
seas ; at any rate, that there was freer communi- 
cation between the Baltic and the Atlantic ocean. 
Similar refuse-heaps occur in various parts of the 
world, on the banks of the great American rivers; 
on the seaboard of South Africa, South America, 
Australia, and wherever man has eaten fish and 
left their bones behind him in his primitive migra- 
tions. These were always along coast-lines and 
by river banks. 

III. Races of the Newer Stone Age. Crossing 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 97 

from the Continent to Britain, what manner of 
men do we find there in early Neolithic times ? 
It may be assumed that the blank which divides 
cave-man at his highest from Neolithic man at 
his lowest exists only because the materials that 
could have filled it are vanished, never to be re- 
covered. That blank marks the interval during 
which Britain " arose from out the azure main," 
and whether or not the rude folk living there, thus 
separated from Europe, were the descendants of 
the cave-men, or whether they had arrived be- 
fore the dividing waters filled the valley of the 
North Sea or widened the Straits of Dover, we 
cannot say. Certain it is that man was then in 
course of advance from the hunting to the pastor- 
al stage. 

Britain was then, and till long within the his- 
toric period, a land of swamp and forest, of chill 
summers, and drenching climate. The inhabit- 
ants lived in caves and rock-shelters where 
these were to be had, otherwise in huts of boughs 
or loam. When the dead were buried, they 
were laid in caves, or in tumuli or long " bar- 
rows " (Anglo-Saxon berg, a hill or hillock; the 
term " cairn " used in Scotland is from Gaelic 
cam, "a heap"), one evidence of the later date 
of the barrows being in the fewer remains of 
wild animals found in them. The human skulls 
also belong to the older or " dolicho-cephalic," 
that is, "long-headed" type. It should be ex- 
plained that skulls are measured by the relation 
of breadth to length, that is, from back to front, 
taking that at one hundred. If the breadth is 
under eighty the skull is called " long-headed," 
if it exceeds eighty, it is called " brachy-cephalic," 
or broad-headed. There are other sub-indices, 
7 



98 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

but with these we are not concerned. The shape 
of the skull, varying, as this does, so little in 
races, is, on the whole, the best test that can be 
applied for their identification. No traces of 
metal are found in any of the long barrows, and 
pottery is rare. Some of these graves are as 
much as four hundred feet long, and fifty feet 
wide. They are modelled upon the natural caves 
which were the abode of the living; for among 
all barbaric people the home of the dead has 
been a copy of his dwelling when alive, a cus- 
tom the meaning of which will appear later on. 
These " long-headed " Neolithic folk, who are gen- 
erally known as " Iberian " (they are also va- 
riously called Berbers, Basques, Silurians, and 
Euskarians), were small-limbed, swarthy-complex- 
ioned, and with dark hair and eyes. Their rep- 
resentatives are widely distributed nowadays, and 
in these islands are found chiefly in the west of 
Ireland and some parts of Wales and the High- 
lands. A typical example is thus described by 
the late Mr. Campbell, of Islay, as met with in his 
travels when collecting West Highland folk-tales 
from the mouths of the people : " Behind the fire 
sat a girl with one of those strange foreign faces 
which are occasionally to be seen in the Western 
Isles, a face which reminded me of the Nineveh 
sculptures, and of faces seen in St. Sebastian. 
Her hair was as black as night, and her clear 
dark eyes glittered through the peat-smoke. Her 
complexion was dark, and her features so unlike 
those who sat about her, that I asked if she were 
a native of the island, and learned that she was 
a Highland girl." The persistence of a race of 
which specimens meet us everywhere, to which, 
in high probability, some of the readers of these 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 99 

pages belong, and which, as there is every rea- 
son to think, is slowly reasserting its old suprem- 
acy, is thus shown by Boyd Dawkins. 

" Through all the troubles which followed the 
conquest of Gaul by Caesar, and of Britain by 
Claudius; through all the terrible events which 
accompanied the downfall of the Roman Empire, 
causing the Britons to be exterminated over a 
large part of England, and the almost total ex- 
tinction of the ancient type of Roman in Italy, 
the Iberian lived, and still is found in his ancient 
seats, with physique scarcely altered, and offering 
a strong contrast to the fair-haired Celtic, Belgic, 
and German invaders. The Iberian race is known 
to the ethnologist and historian merely in frag- 
ments, sundered* from each other by many in- 
vasions and settlements of the Aryan race. It is 
shown by the researches into caves and tombs to 
have been in possession of the whole of Europe 
north and west of the Rhine in the Neolithic Age, 
and has been traced by Dr. Virchow into Germany 
and Denmark." 

Towards the close of that Age another race 
appears in Britain. They contrast in every way 
with the Iberian, being tall, large-limbed, broad- 
skulled, with fair hair and blue eyes. They are 
known as " Celts," one of the three races — the 
others being the Aquitanians and Belgae — who 
were scattered over North-Western Europe in the 
time of Caesar. 

These " ancient Britons," whose tall stature so 
impressed the Romans, lived in " hut circles," or 
"pit dwellings," and buried their dead in round 
barrows — copies of their houses. The log or 
wattle huts have perished, only the traces of their 
ramparts, crowning many a hill, remaining; but 



IOO THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

of the subterranean dwellings abundant specimens 
survive. These are from seven to ten feet in 
depth, were roofed oyer with boughs or flagstones, 
and entered by a sloping shaft, or a narrow " man- 
hole " doorway, near the top. Fragments of pot- 
tery, ornamented, after the fashion of primitive 
ware, by nail or finger-marks, or by impressions 
of a cord twisted round the soft clay; " mealy- 
stones," or querns of a type barely extinct in 
Scotland yet ; bone needles, spindle-whorls, rough- 
ly-chipped celts and arrow-heads, but — at least 
among the earliest deposits — no traces of metals, 
connect them with a people who spun their cloth- 
ing, planted corn, and, as the bones of oxen, 
horses, and pigs show, had tamed some of the 
wild animals. Of course the caves were artificial, 
serving as places of shelter and concealment, so 
that, as Tacitus says of like dwellings among the 
Germans, "should an enemy approach, he lays 
waste the open country, while what is hidden and 
buried is either not known to exist, or else es- 
capes him from the very fact that it has to be 
searched for." The dwellings of primitive people, 
like the implements with which they make shift, 
are of a common type, or, at least, are reducible 
to two or three classes, and the underground 
earth-houses of Europe have their counterpart 
in Asia, Africa, and America. Speaking of some 
native tribes in Central Africa, Mr. Stanley de- 
scribes them as living " in deep pits with small 
circular mouths leading to roomy apartments," 
and the same places of shelter and refuge may 
be traced across the world. Mr. A. H. Savage 
Landor describes the remains of pit-dwellings, 
which abound all over Yezo and the Kurile 
Islands beyond, the implements in them being 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. ioi 

ground adzes, arrow-heads, bone and bamboo 
arrow-points, mingled with fragments of pottery, 
and bones of foxes and other animals. To the 
raisers of the stone beehive-shaped huts and such 
like dwellings may be traced the great mass of 
barrows and kindred structures that in a large 
degree give us the desired key to the thought of 
prehistoric man before it was embodied in oral 
tradition and written on monument, papyrus, or 
wax. 

IV. Earth and Stone Monuments of the Neolithic 
Age. Death, which sweeps us all away, has pre- 
served the records of life as nothing else has done. 
The surface of the earth, wherever man has spread 
himself, is studded with his sepulchres. They 
range from the survival of the ancient mound in 
the little heaped-up grave of Christian church- 
yards to the huge cairns, called pyramids, in which 
the Pharaohs were laid, and the stately monument 
which Queen Artemisia raised over the body of 
Mausolus, whence the name mausoleum. Before 
writing in its earliest form — " picture-writing " — 
was invented, a few loose stones, or a single large 
stone, or, where these were lacking, a heap of 
earth, would mark without inscription the spot 
where the dead were laid, and out of these primi- 
tive monuments have been developed huge tumuli 
and stone sepulchres. Not that every mound is 
a burial-place, some being boundaries, or defensive 
earthworks, or moot or meeting-places, like the 
great mound known as Silbury Hill in Wiltshire, ' 
in which no skeletons have been found. 

Barrows are either long, or more or less circu- 
lar. They are chambered or unchambered, that 
is, either raised over a vault of upright stones, or 
simple excavations in the mound. The use of the 



102 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

same barrows as burial-places has not been lim- 
ited to any one age or race, but the earliest inter- 
ments are easily distinguished from the latest, not 
only by their position, but by the articles which, 
in a large number of cases, are found with the 




Fig. 66.— From tumulus, at Le Tus, Guernsey. 

skeletons. Some of the more important tumuli 
are as much as four hundred feet long, and, in 
certain instances, are approached by an under- 
ground gallery leading to the sepulchral chamber, 
resembling the passage to the " yurts " of the Si- 
berians and the "gamme" or underground dwell- 
ings of the Lapps. The primary interments in the 
long barrows are of the long-headed Iberians ex- 
clusively: the bodies being buried either at full 
length or in a crouched or contracted posture ; 
resting on the haunches, as was the custom among 
the ancient Peruvians, and as is the custom among 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 



103 



the Andaman Islanders. This probably repre- 
sented the squatting position of the deceased dur- 
ing life. Everything, it must be remembered, was 
done to make the grave a copy of the house of 
the living, and to surround the corpse with objects 
familiar to it in life — in short, to make him feel 
" at home, ,, and thus 
" lay the ghost." So 
the long barrow is mod- 
elled on the long-gal- 
leried cave. 




.(X (.VoWMVlTtll ^»+ 



d^. ^aecvxsop 



Speaking of the pri- 
mary interments in them, 
the round or oval bar- 
rows are the burial- 
places of the broad- 
headed " Celts " exclu- 
sively. They were so 
used until the close of 
the Neolithic Age, when 
the practice of burial 
was superseded by that 
of burning, the ashes 
being preserved in a 
stone cist or urn. These 

round barrows are modelled on the hut-circles or 
pit dwellings, and the objects found in them are 
similar in character to those yielded by the dwell- 
ings. Celts, flakes, arrow-heads, and pottery lie 
jumbled together, many of the articles having 
been purposely broken so that their spirits might 
be freed to join the dead owner and serve him, 
as the things themselves had done during his life. 

V. Primitive ideas about Spirits and an After 
life. At this point we may pause to ask what 



Fig. 67. — Plan of tumulus, 
Guernsey, showing position 
of sepulchral chamber. 



104 THE STORY OF " PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

light the contents of his burial-places throw upon 
man's ideas about the spirit-worlcl, since, these be- 
ing known, we hold the key to many a strange 
rite and custom. The answer can be only crudely 
outlined here. In drawing the brief sketch of 
primitive man's explanation of his surroundings, 
the chief feature noted was his confusion of life 
and motion, which led him by easy stages to be- 
lief in spirits everywhere and in everything. This 
belief was confirmed by the events of daily life, 
if those events are not, as some think, the prime 
cause of the belief itself. 

Children and animals lie curled up during 
sleep; only adult man, it is said, has contracted 
the habit of sometimes lying on his back. Al- 
though dreams will happen in whatever position 
we lie down, we know from experience that the 
[more disagreeable ones happen when we rest on 
\our backs, and if, when doing so, the stomach is 
overloaded with food or refuses to digest it, we 
know that bad dreams of the "■ nightmare " kind 
result. And, in the case of barbaric folk, with 
whom the supply of food is often fitful, the 
heavy gorges in which they are prone to indulge 
make their dreams often uncanny. But whether 
these be pleasant or the reverse, there come into 
them apparitions of the dead and living, with 
whom the sleeper. talks or feasts or fights, whom 
he joins in the chase or war-dance — in short, liv- 
ing the old life, the waking life, over again in all 
its reality, with much of strangeness added by the 
odd elements of the dream. 

All which is clear enough to us, however much 
our dreams, especially the gruesome ones, haunt 
our waking moments, because we have learned 
what vagaries of the brain arise through partial 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 105 

sleep. But by the barbaric mind the events 
dreamed of are believed to have really happened ; 
and therein lies not only the vast difference be- 
tween our ways of looking at the thing, but the 
key to the explanation of the beliefs of all the 
lower races, and to such survivals of those beliefs 
as exist — in no small degree — among higher races. 

Everything being thus regarded as real, the 
dead who appear in dreams are alive, and return 
to their old haunts, or receive visits from their 
friends or foes in some place of which the sleeper 
dreams. His squaw, lying wakeful by his side all 
night, may tell him, when she hears what he has 
done, that he has not left his bed. But he knows 
better than that, although she may speak truth; 
and if his body did not move, what did move ? 

Daily experience helps him to an answer. 
Other people are seen sleeping, moving restlessly, 
and then after a time waking-up. Or they are 
stunned by a blow, or falling down in a fit or 
swoon, lie helpless or speechless, perhaps for days, 
and then recover. Or they scream and toss with 
pain, and in other ways lie stricken, and then 
fall into a long, long sleep, and never wake again. 
Or in some more direct and violent way the same 
result happens: they die. To what other conclu- 
sion can the barbaric mind come than that every- 
body has another se/f, as it has been called, which 
does the things dreamed of, which leaves a man 
for a time when he is asleep or in a fit, which 
leaves him altogether when he dies, but comes 
back, and seems the very man himself to the 
dreamer ? 

The Malays do not like to wake a sleeper, lest 
thev should hurt him by disturbing his body 
while his soul is out. When the Greenlander 



Io6 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

dreams of hunting or fishing or courting, he be- 
lieves that the soul quits the body. The Melane- 
sians say that the soul "goes out of the body in 
some dreams, and if for some reason it does not 
come back the man is found dead in the morn- 
ing ; when a man faints, his soul really starts on 
the way to Panoi (the underworld), but is sent 
back ; the other ghosts hustle him away from the 
mouth (of Panoi), or his father or friend turns 
him back, telling him that his time is not yet 
come." And in the Solomon Islands if a child 
starts in its sleep it is believed that some ghost 
is trying to snatch away its soul, as also, if it 
sneezes, the notion is that " a ghost is drawing 
the soul away." But the superstitions which con- 
nect sneezing with spirits would fill a long chap- 
ter. To the Indians of Guiana dream-acts and 
waking-acts differ only in this — that the one are 
done only by the spirit ; the other by the spirit 
in its body. The following example, given, 
among others, by Mr. im Thurn, must suffice. 

" The morning when it was important to me 
to get away from a camp on the Essequibo 
River, at which I had been detained for some 
days by the illness of some of 'my Indian com- 
panions, I found one Of the invalids so enraged 
against me that he refused to stir. For he de- 
clared that I had taken him out during the night 
and had made him haul the canoe up a series of 
difficult cataracts. Nothing could persuade him 
that this was but a dream, and it was some time 
before he was so far pacified as to throw him- 
self sulkily into the bottom of the canoe. At 
that time we were all suffering from scarcity of 
food, and, hunger having its usual effect in pro- 
ducing vivid dreams, similar events frequently 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 1 07 

occurred. More than once the men declared in 
the morning that some absent man, whom they 
named, had come during the night, and had 
beaten or otherwise maltreated them, and they 
insisted on much rubbing of the bruised parts of 
their bodies." 

What is this " other self " like ? It is seen and 
heard, yet never handled. Looking into water, 
a man observes a figure of himself, or when the 
light is present, a dark copy of himself, longer, 
or shorter, or aslant, before, or behind him. 
Both shadow and reflection mimic his move- 
ments. Again : Wherein seems the difference be- 
tween a dead and a living person ? Till decay 
sets in there is little outward change, except 
that the man moves not : 

" Though one should smite him on the cheek, 
Or on the mouth, he will not speak ; " 

and no warm air is felt when his lips are touched. 
So the " other self " comes to be conceived 
of as a sort of vapour, compounded of breath 
and shadow and reflection; " a certain soul and 
semblance, though substance there be none," as 
Achilles says when he clasps the shade of Patro- 
clus in Hades. And in every language, from that 
of the barbaric Ainu to the classic and our own, 
the word for " spirit " and for " breath " is the 
same. Here civilised and savage meet on com- 
mon ground, the answer of each has the same 
vagueness to the question, what is the soul like ? 
And when we seek to envisage its "questionable 
shape " it is conceived of as a sort of replica of 
the body all the world over, throughout races at 
every level of culture. That Christian art could 
accomplish nothing higher is seen in the frescoes 



108 THE STORY OP " PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

on the walls of the Campo Santo at Pisa, where 
the soul is portrayed as a sexless child emerging 
from the mouth of a corpse; in an elaborately 
sculptured monument over the tomb of Bishop 
Giles de Bridport in the east transept of Salisbury 
Cathedral, where the soul is represented as a 
naked figure being carried by an angel to heaven ; 
and in every other expression of the sculptor's 
and painter's art. 

And this " other self," whether its destiny be 
the upper or nether world, hovers about its old 
home and haunts. When whaling vessels first 
touched at Banks' Islands, the natives argued 
that the crew were not men, because, if they were, 
they would be black. They must therefore be 
the ghosts of men who had lived. When Bishop 
Patteson landed at Mota, one of the same island 
group, it was held that he was a ghost, and on 
his retiring from the heat and crowd to an empty 
house, the owner of which had lately died, the 
natives were satisfied that he was the ghost of 
the dead man, for did he not know his home ? 
The grave, however, as containing the body, was 
the more direct place of communication with the 
dead, and therefore with the spirit. Round it 
gathered from primitive times customs which, in 
one form or another, are in full force to this day. 
The belief that the dead man still required the 
necessaries of life made the supply of these a 
solemn duty, and while piety and sympathy aided 
the discharge of this, prudence prompted care 
that no neglect should offend those who per- 
chance had acquired new power to help or harm 
the living. Hence, as shown by the food and 
libations brought to every grave, barbarian, clas- 
sic, and Christian, and by the articles deposited 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 1 09 

with the corpse, each of which was, in the lower 
culture, also believed to have its " other self," 
nothing was left undone to make the dead con- 
tent with their new lot. From the Reindeer period 
to the Christian era it is the same. The child's 
rude ivory doll found in the Dordogne cave has 
its counterpart in the terra-cotta dolls and ani- 
mals found in the tombs of Pompeian children, 
and in like objects in the catacombs of Rome. 
Perhaps one of the most touching relics, linking 
past and present, is that of the skeleton of a 
young woman clasping a child found in a round 
barrow on Dunstable Downs, the grave being 
edged with fossil echini or sea urchins, which the 
peasants call " fairy loaves." 

In examining British tumuli Canon Greenwell 
frequently found holes below the natural surface, 
inside the barrow, usually only filled with the soil, 
but occasionally with human bones, fragments of 
pottery and charcoal. The probability is that 
these cup-like hollows were receptacles for food 
or drink for the use of the dead, like the cups 
filled with holy water sometimes seen on Roman 
Catholic graves on the Continent, the use of 
which, although now symbolical, is a survival of 
primitive custom. That custom has abundant 
illustration among modern barbaric folk. To 
cite an example or two, the Bodo of India carry 
the dead man's share of food and drink to the 
grave, saying, "Take and eat, heretofore you 
have eaten and drunk with us, you can do so no 
more; you were one of us, you can be so no 
longer; we come no more to you, come you not 
to us." Then each man throws on the grave a 
thread bracelet, which he breaks off his wrist in 
token that the tie between dead and living is 



IIO THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

snapped, and the company afterwards bathe 
before feasting. This idea of impurity through 
contact with the dead, is world-wide, as shown in 
the lustrations practised by every race. At their 
funeral feasts the Solomon Islanders throw a 
piece of food into the fire, saying to the dead, 
"This is for you," and even at their daily meal, 
when the oven is opened, a portion is put aside 
for the dead. The Celestial "keeps his coffined 
parent for years, and serves him with meals as if 
he were still alive. " But China is the home of 
ancestor-worship on the hugest scale; not only 
are the dead treated as if alive, but as also ca- 
pable of being promoted, by Imperial decree, to 
higher rank, as are the gods themselves. Curious 
examples of this appear from time to time in the 
Pekin Gazette, which is the oldest newspaper in 
the world. For example, when the dragon-spirit 
of Han Tan Hien added to the favours which it 
had already conferred by visiting certain prov- 
inces with much-needed rain, it was ordered that 
the god should be invested with the additional 
title of "the Dragon-Spirit of the Sacred Well/' 
In another Gazette the " Director-General of Grain 
Transports prays that a distinction be granted to 
the god of winds, who protected the dykes of the 
Grand Canal; whereupon the Board of Rites is 
called upon for a report." When Kwangte, a 
great commander, who was deified eight hundred 
years after his death as the God of War, was be- 
lieved to have aided the Imperial troops in crush- 
ing the Taiping rebellion in 1855, the Emperor 
issued a decree promoting him to equal rank with 
Confucius. The Roman Catholic Church does 
precisely the same thing in canonising the more 
distinguished defenders of the faith centuries after 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. Ill 

their death. Barbarian and civilised are alike in 
this, as in so much else; and thus it is that the 
Tonga belief as to the existence of caste in an- 
other world obtains among civilised people. The 
Hindu offers the funeral cakes, with which may 
be classed the u simnels " still made in England, 
and the "soul-bread" in Belgium. But, more 
often, special seasons are dedicated to the service 
of the dead, as is the Fiji offering of the earliest 
yams; in the Slavonic custom of laying food on 
the grave in springtime ; in the Bulgarian feasts 
in the cemeteries on Palm Sunday, when the re- 
mains are left to be eaten by the dead ; in the last 
day of the feast of Bacchus, the All Souls' Days 
of the Greeks ; and in the commemorative festival 
of like name among Christians. 

The primitive and grosser idea is that the 
spirits ate and drank of the actual things offered, 
as among the Congos, who send the meals through 
an opening in the grave to the mouth of the 
corpse. The Greek offerings of food and drink 
at the tombs made their mocking satirist, Lucian, 
ask if the libations filtered through the ground 
to Hades. But the source of the idea is clear 
enough. Solids, when burnt, pass away in the 
form of smoke, or, when left anywhere, lose their 
moisture and shrivel up; liquids, poured on the 
ground or heated, evaporate; hence the conclu- 
sion that both are consumed by the shadow-soul. 
For what does the barbaric mind know of the 
processes of heat and evaporation ? Later on, 
the belief prevails that the incorporeal spirit con- 
sumes only the essence of things; the "sweet- 
smelling savour" satisfies the ethereal nostrils, 
and the coarser parts are left behind. 

The bones often found near Neolithic barrows 



112 THE STORY OF " PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

evidence the great antiquity of the custom of 
feasting at the grave as a commensal act between 
the dead and living, and the cloven skulls of 
human beings associated with these remains tell 
of the sacrifice of slaves and prisoners, that the 
departed, especially those of higher rank, may 
not lack attendants. Other human bones point 
to the self-sacrifice of wives that they might join 
their dead husbands. But the care and complete- 
ness with w r hich, to the smallest detail, the sup- 
posed needs of the dead were supplied were 
largely due to the fear of his coming back. The 
unburied soul hovered restless and troublesome, 
denied admittance to the underworld. " Bury me 
with all speed, that I pass the gates of Hades," 
prayed the spirit of dead Patroclus to Achilles in 
a dream; and once housed in the tomb, the chief 
thing was to keep the body there. Earth or 
stones were heaped upon it to prevent its return 
to the living; the legs were tied to the body, as 
among the Australians; pins driven into the feet, 
as among the Icelanders ; or a stake through the 
body, as among ourselves, in burying the suicide 
by the puzzling four cross-way. All sorts of 
dodges were used to baulk any attempt of the 
dead to return. In the Solomon Islands the fu- 
neral procession comes back by another road, 
lest the corpse should follow ; the Hottentots re- 
move the dead by a special opening in the hut; 
the Minahassees of Celebes, before burying the 
corpse, thrust it into a hole in the floor, and carry 
it three times round the house; in Homer the 
dead Patroclus was laid with the feet towards the 
door of the tent ; and in some parts of Europe to 
this day the body is carried from the house with 
the feet outwards, or, as among the peasants of 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 



"3 



Brandenburg, when the coffin has left, a pail of 
water is emptied at the door to hinder the ghost 
from entering. For spirits and witches were sup- 




Fig. 68.— Holed dolmen, Circassia. (From original drawing on 
the spot by William Simpson, R. W. I.) 

posed to be unable to cross w r ater, which may 
perhaps account for the frequent burial of the 
dead, as among the Celts, in islands. 

But, in these matters, the barbaric mind, as 
Indeed that of higher folk, is a tangle of contra- 
dictions. For while, as the foregoing examples 
show, among every people pity and fear unite to 
secure rest and comfort to the departed, we find 
frequently in cromlechs, dolmens, funeral urns, 
aud in tombs of the later Roman period, little 
openings the probable object of which was to 

8 



114 THE STORY OF " PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

give ingress and egress to the ghost. This is, in 
fact, the reason assigned by the Iroquois : that 
the soul may come out and go in at pleasure. 
Among the rustic folk of civilised countries the 
same idea takes the shape of opening a window 
in the room of the dying so that the spirit may 
depart unhindered; and is expressed in the Ger- 
man saying that one should not slam a door lest 
a soul gets pinched in it. 

Connected with openings in tombs is the prac- 
tice of the trepanning of skulls, or the boring of 
a hole in them. It was practised in pre-historic 
times, as shown by skulls found in Neolithic 
caves both in the Old World and the New. The 
circular pieces of bone thus cut away were often 
worn as charms; but their removal was probably 
due to the desire to afford the soul of the dead 
free passage, and to cure diseases of epileptic 
and other nervous kinds among the living. The 
trephine used in modern surgery for removing 
portions of bone in cases of injury to the head 
is thus the lineal descendant of the flint saw of 
the Neolithic operator. His ideas were at the level 
of those of the barbaric mind all the world over 
in its explanation of disease as due to the pres- 
ence of evil spirits through sorcery or other black 
arts; hence the making of a hole to let out the 
demon. Among the Melanesians, whose ideas as 
to the causes of sickness may be taken as largely 
representative of barbaric belief, it is always, ex- 
cept in common and slight complaints, said to 
be caused by a ghost or soul of a dead person, 
as contrasted with a spirit or supernatural being 
that never was in a body. " It happens, indeed, 
as in the New Hebrides, where spirits are the 
chief objects of religious regard, that a man 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 



115 



knows that he has trespassed on a sacred place 
belonging to some spirit, or has an ill-wisher who 




has a spirit for a helper, and supposes therefore 
when he is ill that a spirit has brought his sick- 
ness on him. But generally it is to the ghosts 



Il6 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

of the dead that sickness is ascribed ; recourse 
is had to them for aid in causing and removing 
sickness; and ghosts are believed to inflict sick- 
ness not only because Some offence has been done 
against them, or because one familiar with them 
has sought their aid with sacrifice and spells, 
but because there is a certain malignity in the 
feeling of all ghosts towards the living, who 
offend them by being alive," For death, like dis- 
ease, is not regarded as a natural event ; hence, 
amongst reasons already cited, the appeasement 
of the unwilling departed. Language bears its 
testimony to barbaric theories, as in " seizure," 
" possession," being " out of one's mind " ; and 
in the folk-lore of North England, in which " cast- 
ing out the ague " was but another name for 
"casting out the devil." 

Since these ideas about sickness and death 
and the fate of the dead are part and parcel of 
the mental stock of primitive man, and have re- 
mained unchanged in essence, and but slightly 
altered in form, to this day, their importance 
cannot be overrated. Without them, futile are 
all attempts to explain the meaning of customs 
that have ruled nearly every act of life of many 
peoples, and that still rule a large part of the life 
af all peoples. With them, we read, as in open 
book, what mean the scattered relics of feastings 
at the grave; the modelling of the tomb upon the 
lines of the house ; the decoration and furnishing 
of it as a place where the ghost might eat, drink, 
and be merry, and enjoy the flowers that gar- 
landed it and the libations poured upon it. And 
only with knowledge of these ideas can we follow 
the steps by which the transition was made from 
grave to altar, and from altar to temple. For the 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 117 

burial-places, where the scene of feasts of the 
dead were held, became altars whereon sacrifices 
were offered to the ancestral spirits, worship of 
whom is a leading element under various forms 
in the religions of every race and age, whether 
among barbaric or civilised peoples. The altars, 
each containing its relics of the dead, were the 
nuclei of temples from the rude stone circle up- 
ward, through many gradations, to the church of 
St. Peter in Rome, wherein the saints' bones are 
said to lie. 

The stone structures which, in more or less 
ruined state, are scattered in thousands over both 
hemispheres, are the special feature of Neolithic 
times. They are reducible to three classes: 1. 
Single upright stones called menhirs (from Celtic 
maen, a stone ; and hir, high), which may have 
been commemorative of events, or set up as monu- 
ments of the dead. 2. Dolmens (from Celtic daul, 
a table ; and maen), consisting of three or four 
rude stones on which another stone is placed, 
forming a chamber ; a structure of widespread 
distribution, and of which " Kits Coty House," 
near Aylesford, in Kent, is a notable example. 3. 
Cromlechs (from Celtic crom, a circle ; and Heck, a 
stone), circles enclosing barrows and dolmens, or 
standing by themselves. Like the long and round 
tumuli, they are modelled on the primitive dwelU 
ing, the ring of stones corresponding to the fence 
round the Neolithic " hut-circles," or to the stones 
which prop up the turf-covered houses of the 
Lapps. Misnamed as Druids' Circles, Giants' 
Graves, Odin's stones; the home of legends of 
surprising deeds wrought by the Devil ; of myths 
of ogres and dwarfs ; of Sabbath-breakers and 
infidels turned into stone, these venerable crom- 



Il8 THE STORY OF ''PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

lechs are invested with a mystery which deepens 
their charm. If not themselves the objects of 
worship they stand in near alliance with, to us, 
that strangest of primitive idolatries, the worship 
of stocks and stones, than which none has had a 
wider range. The cause of this expression of the 
religious sentiment lies in the universal barbaric 
tendency to confuse persons and things, and to 
attribute, through superficial and seeming like- 
nesses, virtue or power to lifeless objects. 

Borrowing what is the best illustration of this, 
namely, the practice of barbaric folk as observed 
by travellers, we are told that in Melanesia, 
when a man sees a fantastic- looking stone, one, 
say, shaped like a breadfruit, he buries it near a 
breadfruit tree. Perhaps, through a favourable 
season, he gets an extra crop, whereupon he is 
satisfied that the stone has a spirit in it which 
has made the tree yield better. Hence the stone 
becomes sacred, an object of worship, an heirloom 
in the family. If, in the same islands, a native 
comes upon a big stone with a number of little 
stones underneath it, like a sow with her litter, he 
will make an offering to it, in the belief that it 
will bring him pigs. Mr. Codrington, who is the 
authority for these examples, says that sacred 
stones abound, especially in all sacred places, in 
the Solomon Islands; food is laid on them to se- 
cure good crops, cooked fish being used if a large 
catch is wanted, in accordance with the barbaric 
idea that like produces like, however far-fetched 
the similarity may be. 

In this, ancient and modern meet together. 
The anointing of the sacred stone at Bethel by 
Jacob is paralleled by the Society Islander, who 
smears a basaltic rock with oil ; and the reproach 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 119 

of the later Isaiah against the drink-offerings of 
the Jews to the " smooth stones of the valley " 
shows them at the level of the natives of the 
New Hebrides, who worship water-worn pebbles. 
And if, as has been seen, celts and arrow-heads 
have been looked upon as of celestial origin, or 
as the work of superhuman beings, aerolites or 
meteoric stones have, with better reason, been 
regarded as falling from heaven. Such is the 
" Black Stone " of the sacred Kaabah at Mecca, 
which is reported to be an aerolite ; such too, 
perhaps, is the pyramid-like stone worshipped by 
the Hindus at Jagannath, as also the stone which, 
falling near a sacred place, was worshipped in 
Mexico as the son of divine parents. 

Jews, Greeks, and Romans were on a par with 
the Hindu villagers of to-day in the worship of 
standing stones ; unwrought stones had place of 
honour in classic temples, representing the greater 
gods and " receiving care and decoration as well 
as worship." In the Temple of Heaven at Pekin 
seven unhewn boulders guard the fortunes of the 
Imperial dynasty ; and with the ceremonial seats 
hewn in the solid rock for Mexican rulers may be 
classed the stone of Scone which is underneath 
the seat of the coronation chair in Westminster 
Abbey. It is called the Lia Fail, or " Stone of 
Destiny," and is said to have been the stone 
which Jacob used for a pillow when he slept at 
Bethel, and had sweet dreams of angels. Some- 
how it reached Ireland (home of many a tradition), 
and was finally brought to Scone. Another old 
relic, the London stone in Cannon Street, con- 
nects the sacred boundary-stone with Hermes or 
Mercury, among whose many characters was that 
of a boundary god in the shape of an upright 



120 THE STORY OF " PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

stone. In their boundary-stone festival — theTer- 
minalia — the ancient Romans honoured one of the 
oldest and most sacred of their divinities. For 
the well-being of a people is dependent on the 
cultivation of the soil, which involves measure- 
ment and boundary-marks : hence the importance 
of these, and their divine protection. The per- 
sistence of stock and stone worship in Europe is 
shown in the succession of decrees issued against 
it down to the reign of Cnut, in the eleventh cen- 
tury. About the seventh century the Council of 
Nantes " exhorts Bishops and their servants to 
dig up and remove and hide in places where they 
cannot be found those stones which in remote 
and woody places are still worshipped, and where 
vows are still made/' and four hundred years 
later a statute of Cnut forbids the " barbarous 
worship of Stones, Trees, Fountains, and of the 
heavenly bodies.' , 

VI. Stone Circles. To return to the cromlechs. 
Of these the largest relic in this island is near 
Abury (or Avebury) in Wiltshire. Aubrey, an 
antiquary of the seventeenth century, describes it 
as " exceeding in greatness the so renowned Stone- 
henge as cathedral doeth a parish church. " But 
it is so ruined as to be scarcely distinguishable to 
the unpractised eye seeking for fragments of its 
circles within circles amongst the barrow-strewn 
ridges. Indeed, barely a score of stones out of 
hundreds now remain. Most of them have been 
used to build the modern village which stands 
within the ramparts that surrounded the outer ring 
of stones. 

Later in time is the famous Stonehenge, one 
of the most impressive ruins in the world, both as 
regards character and situation. Standing before 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 



121 



this mute, desolate pile, while we can only specu- 
late on what strange rites, what bloody sacrifices, 
have been performed within it, we may feel sure 







that it represents a stage of religious culture sim- 
ilar to that which the foregoing examples illus- 



122 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

trate. Although it is a confused ruin, the origi- 
nal plan has been clearly traced. Briefly stated, 
it consisted of two concentric circles enclosing 
two ellipses both open at the north-east end, the 
whole being enclosed within an earthen rampart 
or ditch. The outer circle was composed of large 
squared and roughly hewn stones with imposts 
morticed into them, forming an unbroken colon- 
nade. They are of a sandstone which occurs in 
the neighbourhood, and are locally known as " sar- 
sens," from a myth that they were " Saracen " or 
Paynim warriors who had been turned into stone. 
A similar legend has gathered round the Rollright 
Stones, a cromlech in Oxfordshire, the standing 
stones of which are said to be a petrified king and 
soldiers. The inner circle consists of undressed 
stones called " blue stones," which must have been 
brought thither, since they are not found nearer 
than North Wales or the Channel Islands. The 
ellipses are formed of five trilithons, or two huge 
upright stones supporting an impost or lintel. 
These were arranged in horse-shoe form, and are 
of the same material as the stones of the outer 
circle. A smaller ellipse of " blue stones," but 
without imposts, stands within them, and within 
this double " horse-shoe " is a large flat slab called 
the "altar stone." The circles were approached 
by an avenue in which stands a large unwrought 
stone known as the " Friar's Heel." The inter- 
esting feature in connection with these two last- 
named stones is that on the longest day of the 
year the sun rises immediately over the " Friar's 
Heel," his rays falling on the "altar stone," and 
that on the shortest day the sun rises and sets 
directly over some small stones beyond the outer- 
most circle. This has led to the theory that 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 



123 



Stonehenge was a seat of sun-worship, but the 
various suppositions about its origin and exact 
purpose cause us to fall back on the cautious re- 




Fig. 71. — Trilithon, Stonehenge. 

marks which Pepys sets down in his Diary after 
visiting the place in 1668. " God knows what 
their use was. They are hard to tell, and mav vet 



124 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

be told." Still, we have made no small advance 
in knowledge of the significance of ancient mon- 
uments since Pepys' day, and, with the three hun- 
dred tumuli within a radius of three miles from 
Stonehenge, may feel little doubt that it was sepul- 
chral in origin. Recurring to the unquestioned 
relation of the dwelling of the living to the tomb 
of the dead, we may see in the surrounding earth- 
work the village rampart ; in the avenue — dwarfed 
type of the extensive ruins at Carnac, in Brittany 
— the underground gallery leading to the pit- 
dwelling; and in the circle the enlargement of 
the ring of stones which surrounded or supported 
the beehive-like hut. The exploration of the 
area within the pillar-stones has not been com- 
plete, and the fragments found — bones of animals 
and shreds of rude pottery — have added little to 
our knowledge. If any support could be found 
for the theory that a tree — the sacred oak, a su- 
preme object in the nature worship of Neolithic 
people in Europe— stood within the central sanc- 
tum, some links between the old temple and the 
Druids, about whom much nonsense has been 
written, might be established. 

Before passing from the great monument of 
our Wiltshire downs, with their dykes and bar- 
rows, and relics of Old Sarum and the like, the sig- 
nificance of the sun's rays in striking the " altar 
stone " at the summer solstice demands brief 
comment. The interest of this is increased by 
Mr. Lockyer's researches among the great tem- 
ples of Egypt, the results of which appear to show 
that their avenues were so built that at the sum- 
mer solstice the light flashed down them and 
illuminated the figure of the god which stood in 
the sanctuary at the end of the long axis. As 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 125 

everybody knows, this corresponds to what is 
called the " eastward position," that is, the " orien- 
tation, " or building of churches so* that the chan- 
cel points to that part of the east in which the 
sun rises on the day of the saint to whom the 
church is dedicated. This ancient custom is a 
relic of sun-worship and perhaps also of star- 
worship, since, according to Mr. Lockyer, whose 
theories, however, are open to question, certain 
temples were " oriented " to Sirius and other stars. 
It also explains the burial of the dead sitting with 
face to the east, although often in the opposite 
direction, looking westward, where many a bar- 
baric folk has placed the home of souls. As Dr. 
Tylor remarks, " it is not to late and isolated 
fancy, but to the carrying on of ancient and wide- 
spread solar ideas, that we trace the well-known 
legend that the body of Christ was laid with the 
head towards the west, thus looking eastward, 
and the Christian usage of digging graves east 
and west which prevailed through mediaeval times 
is not yet forgotten. The rule of laying the head 
to the west, and its meaning that the dead shall 
rise looking towards the east, are perfectly stated 
in an ecclesiastical treatise of the sixteenth cen- 
tury." 

Stone circles extend, with certain gaps, from 
Scotland to the Antipodes. The largest example 
north of the Tweed is the cromlech at Stennis, in 
Orkney, near which stood a holed stone, cele- 
brated as the betrothal place of lovers who, in 
clasping hands through it, regarded the vow as 
especially binding. Some writers conjecture that 
the wedding ring, as a piece of perforated metal, 
has its origin in customs like the foregoing. Be 
this so or not, every boy who carries a lucky- 



126 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

stone in his pocket represents the superstitions 
which have attached themselves to stones with a 
hole in them, whether the hole be large enough to 
pass a child through for cure of some disorder, or 
the stone small enough to be used, as among rus- 
tics in Suffolk and elsewhere, as a charm against 
nightmare; or tied to the key of a stable-door to 
prevent the witches from stealing the horses. The 
standing stones at Carnac, in Brittany, were ar- 
ranged in the form of eleven roughly parallel 
avenues, which must have originally extended sev- 
eral miles. Whether they led to any central mon-. 
ument is unknown. Their purpose remains a mys- 
tery, like that of the storied cone-shaped towers 
in Sardinia, called nuraghe (although Mommsen 
calls these " sepulchral"), and the cyclopean 
" talayots " of Minorca. 

Cromlechs are not uncommon in Northern 
Arabia and the peninsula of Sinai, while, as show- 
ing that the old motives still prompt their erec- 
tion, the Khasias of Bengal, "among whom only 
funeral ceremonies are of any importance," raise 
undressed stones of gigantic size as monuments, 
singly or in rows, or circles, supporting one 
another like those of Stonehenge, which they 
rival in dimensions and appearance. Aristotle 
tells us in his " Politics " that the Iberians were 
in the habit of placing as many stones round the 
tomb of a dead warrior as he had slain enemies, 
and some Australian tribes are reported to place 
pillar-stones round the burial-place of famous 
brave or chief. If no other evidence existed, that 
which is supplied by the rude stone structures in 
all parts of the globe suffices to link the barbaric 
peoples of every age in one common chain of 
ideas, and of practices which are the outcome of 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 1 27 

those ideas. And the same chain lengthens till it 
touches the higher races, in whose finished prod- 
ucts the raw material can be traced. The men- 
hir is the rude original of the columns of Trajan 
and of Nelson ; the dolmen of the sarcophagus 
of Ramses and the tomb of Wellington ; and the 
cromlech of our Temple church, which was built 
by the Templars in the twelfth century in recol- 
lection of the round church of the Holy Sepulchre, 
at Jerusalem. Between Stonehenge and the fair 
cathedral whose spire we see as were turn to Salis- 
bury the chain of continuity is complete. 

Although perhaps not the most consistent, 
this is the more convenient place to refer to the 
remarkable earth mounds which exist in thou- 
sands over the central parts of North America, 
especially in the basin of the Mississippi. For 
although the contents show that their builders 
were acquainted with metals in the shape of cop- 
per, the primitive way in which they worked a 
material found in hard lumps in a native state, 
namely, by simply hammering it into the required 
shape, evidences their being in the transition stage 
between the Ages of Stone and Bronze. The 
mounds are divisible into three or four groups: 
military or defensive; sepulchral or temple; and 
animal. As with the remains which witness to 
the relative succession of " Iberians " and " Celts " 
in Europe, so these American remains yield traces 
of a long-headed race and of a later and conquer- 
ing round-headed race ; while, to complete the 
interesting similarities, the finds of rudely-chipped 
stone implements point to a Palaeolithic folk, who 
perhaps battled with the megatherium (a huge 
mammal allied to the sloth) when his fellow flint- 
chipper was killing the mammoth in Europe. 



128 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

The vast extent of some of the fortifications is 
shown in the remains of Fort Ancient, in Ohio. 
These are "nearly a mile in length from north 
to south, with more than 20,000 feet of wall, 
more than five miles of terraces, and more than 
ten miles altogether of artificial work." They 
may have formed part of a connected line of de- 
fence as far as New York. The burial mounds 
outnumber the military by tens of thousands, 
most of them containing one body buried in the 
contracted posture referred to already, and the 
others only the burnt ashes of the corpse. Some 
of these mounds were modelled on the plan of the 
dwellings; others are probably dwellings which 
have been converted into burial-places. Both 
sepulchral and temple mounds yield traces of 
barbaric sacrificial rites. Among the distinctive 
relics are immense numbers of carved and orna- 
mented pipes, which appear to have been used 
in connection with offerings to the gods, for there 
is little doubt that the " fragrant weed " was 
burnt at their altars, and originally applied only 
to sacred purposes. Strangest of all are the 
"animal mounds," shaped in low relief on the 
surface of the ground as figures of men, birds, 
and reptiles, extending in some instances to a 
length of several hundred feet. One of the 
largest, called the " Great Serpent," starts from 
an oval enclosure at the end of a promontory by 
a tributary of the Ohio. The jaws are distended, 
" as if in the act of swallowing what, in com- 
parison with the huge dimensions of the head, 
is spoken of as an egg y though it measures 160 
feet in length. Conforming to the summit of 
the hill, the body of the serpent winds back for 
700 feet in graceful undulations, terminating 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 129 

with a triple coil at the tail. The figure is 
clearly and boldly defined, the earth-wrought 
relievo being upwards of five feet in height by 
30 feet in base at the centre of the body, and 
diminishing towards the head and tail. The en- 
tire length, following its convolutions, cannot 
measure less than 1,000 feet. On either side of 
the serpent's head two small triangular eleva- 
tions extend, looking on the ground plan like ex- 
ternal gills, but they are so much obliterated as 
to render their original form uncertain." Specu- 
lation was for long rife as to the race who had 
left these curious structures behind, but there is 
no longer any question that " the mysterious 
' Mound-builders ' were the ancestors of the Red 
Indians. Every relic of their supposed civilisa- 
tion corresponds with something that can be 
clearly traced to ordinary Indian hands ; and 
traditions have here and there survived attribu- 
ting the great earthworks of the Ohio to the red 
man's ancestors. These traditions ascribe their 
construction to an age not very remote, when 
those ancestors were more numerous and pros- 
perous than in historical times, and when they 
were liable to attack in the course of southward 
migrations which were taking place on the Pacific 
side of the Continent. The history of the ' Mound- 
builders ' thus merges in the general story of the 
American aborigines." 

The barbaric mind, with its belief in spirits 
dwelling in lifeless things, in big stones as the 
parents of little stones, and so forth, seems to 
reach a higher plane when it conceives of a life 
shared in common by man and animal and plant, 
and thereupon frames its myths — real enough to 
itself — of human descent from trees and animals, 
9 



13° 



THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 



rather than from stones. The passage from this to 
the worship of plants and animals is then a short 




Fig. 72. — Irish Crannoge. 

one, if, indeed, the steps be not taken together. 
Be this as it may, the belief in such descent is 
found among barbaric folk everywhere, and must 
have had its germs in the mind of primitive man. 
It has led to some curious customs, such as not 



y- %i 




Fig. 73. — Ideal restoration of a Swiss lake-dwelling. 



eating the animal or plant which is the " totem " 
or " clan-mark " of the tribe, and in not marrying 
a woman of the tribe because she bears the same 
name as the man. The subject, full of interest 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 131 

as it is, would lead us too far afield, and is referred 
to here as possibly throwing light on the carving 
of the soil into fantastic " animal " mounds. For 
totemism survives in its most primitive form 
among two races : the black fellows of Australia 
and the North American Indians. The word it- 
self is derived from the Algonquin " dodaim " 
or " dodhaim " — " clan-mark." Man everywhere 
makes images of his gods as he conceives them, 
and the " Great Serpent," with its allied figures, 
may be the Red Indian's tribute to the creatures 
whom his fancy and his fears have promoted 
from ancestors to the rank of deities. 

VII. Reinains found in Lake- Dwellings. A wel- 
come addition to our knowledge of Neolithic 
times was made through the discovery of remains 
associated with defensive structures — as " cran- 
noges " — built on islands, both natural and artifi- 
cial ; and, more especially, with dwellings on piles 
driven into the bed of lakes. This mode of life, 
obviously chosen as a protection against foes and 
wild beasts, is still extant, "pile-dwellings" being 
common in Central Africa, South America, New 
Guinea, Borneo, and elsewhere. Venice, the 
dreaming city u that is always putting out to sea," 
which was founded about fifteen centuries ago by 
refugees from the mainland, is an example on a 
large scale. History records the use of such 
dwellings in Greece and Asia Minor; a represen- 
tation of one is sculptured on Trajan's column; 
and the traces of a pile-dwelling were found in 
Moorfields, near London Wall. An old writer of 
the fourteenth century, quoted by Dr. Keller in 
his classic work on " Lake Dwellings," speaks of 
the Apamoean lake in Asia Minor " as commonly 
called the lake of the Christians, because it is in- 



132 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

habited by Christian fishermen, who live in wooden 
huts built upon piles." But the earliest notice of 
such dwellings is given in Herodotus, who thus 
describes the aquatic life of the ancient Pceonians 



Fig. 74. — Lake-dwelling {Cameron* s " Across Africa"). 

on Lake Prasias, the modern Lake Takiros, in 
Thrace : 

" They who inhabited Lake Prasias were not 
conquered at all by Megabazos. He sought in- 
deed to subdue the dwellers on the lake, but could 
not effect his purpose. Their manner of living is 
the following : a platform fastened together and 
resting upon tall piles stood in the middle of the 
water of the lake, with a narrow approach to it 
from the mainland by a single bridge. At first 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 



*33 



the piles were no doubt fixed in their places by all 
the members of the community working together, 
but since that time they continue to set them by 
observance of this rule ; that is to say, every man 
who marries brings from the mountain called Or- 
belos three piles for each wife, and sets them as 




Fig. 75.— Town of Brunei, Borneo, built on piles {Clutterbuck). 



supports; and each man takes to himself many 
wives. And they have their dwelling thus, that 
is, each man has his own hut upon the platform 
in which he lives, and a trapdoor leading through 
the platform down to the lake ; and their infant 
children they tie with a rope by the foot, for fear 
they should roll into the water. They feed ttieir 
horses and their beasts of burden upon fish ; 
and of fish there is so great quantity that if a 
man open the trapdoor and let down an empty 
basket by a cord into the lake, after waiting 



134 THE STORY OF •• PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

quite a short time he draws it up again full of 
fish.*' Herodotus lived two thousand four hun- 
dred years ago, but fishermen still have their 
wooden huts on Lake Prasias. The history of 
nearly all the relics of pre-historic man repeats 
itself in the tardy or ungracious recognition of 
their meaning and, as it has always turned out, 
their high value. Although as far back as 1829 
artificially shaped piles and other remains were 
discovered when the harbour at Ober Meilen, 00 
the Lake of Zurich, was being deepened, they ex- 
cited little inquiry. A quarter of a century later 
the dry winter caused the lakes and rivers of 
Switzerland to fall much below their usual level, 
and the inhabitants of Ober Meilen took advan- 
tage of this to reclaim the exposed land, raising 
it with mud dredged from the neighbouring shal- 
low water. In removing the mud the workmen 
came upon a number of deeply-driven piles of 
oak, beech, fir, and birch, which some fishing folk, 
whose nets had been often entangled m them, 
had mistaken years before for submerged forests. 
Around the piles were found large numbers of 
primitive weapons, both of stone and bone, frag- 
ments of coarse pottery (of the potter's wheel, the 
invention of which is claimed by the Greeks — 
there is no trace), charred wood, and other burnt 
materials, the examination of all which satisfied 
Dr. Keller that the pifes had supported a platform 
on which huts had been built„ and that the whole 
structure had been ultimately destroyed by fire. 
The researches to which this discovery gave im- 
petus have been carried on since 1854 to the 
present time, and established the fact that a large 
population lived in this aquatic fashion in Central 
Europe and the British Isles, not only through 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 



135 



Neolithic times, but also through the Ages of 
Copper, Bronze, and Iron, and in Switzerland un- 
til the first century after Christ. Above two hun- 
dred of these habitations are known to have ex- 
isted in Switzerland, the Lake of Neuchatel having 
furnished one-quarter of the whole. And as each 
village contained on an average about three hun- 
dred huts, the population was not inconsiderable. 
Choosing a sheltered and protected spot, the set- 
tlers cut down trees with their stone axes, and 
sharpened them with fire: a long and arduous 




Fig. 76. — Pottery from Auvernier, etc. 

labour, some forty to fifty thousand piles being 
needed for a small village. These were then 
driven into the bed of the lake, about two or 
three hundred feet from the shore, till they were 
all at the same level, when wooden planks were 
fastened to them with pegs to make the platform. 
On this were raised the square or oblong-shaped 
huts, each large enough to contain a family. They 
were made of woven twigs plastered with clay, 
the roof being thatched. Between each dwelling 
were placed the cattle-pens, sheepfolds, and pig- 



136 



THE STORY OF " PRIMITIVE" MAN. 



sties, a gangway being built between the village 
and the shore, for the use of the cattle when 
driven to pasture, and for general access to the 
mainland. The lake-dwellers fished, either from 
the stage or in their " dug-out " canoes, hunted, 
tilled the soil, and tended the cattle. 

Some of the sites contain remains belonging 
to different periods, and this mixture of stone and 
metal relics complicates any attempt at clear ar- 
rangement. But without making the blunder of 
forcing every class of objects into one of the three 
" Ages," as to the over-lapping of which the Lake- 
dwellings are among the numerous examples, 




Fig. 77. — " Dug-out" canoe, Meiningen. 



there are sufficient distinctions among the several 
groups to assign some to the Stone Age (in the 
Lakes of Bienne and Neuchatel), others to the 
Bronze Age, and a very few to the Iron Age. The 
pile-dwellings of East Switzerland are the earlier, 
and those of the West and Central Switzerland 
the later, the number becoming fewer as civilisa- 
tion advanced, rendering life and property more 
secure, and encouraging the settlers to remove 
from the water to the land. The modern Swiss 
chalet is probably a copy of the lake-dwelling. 
Buried in the soil with fragments of the huts, a 
rich harvest of relics has been gathered, where- 
with, aided by our knowledge of modern aquatic 
modes of life, a fairly complete sketch of these 
Neolithic folk has been made possible. Arrow- 
heads, lance-heads, and polished stone axes, frag- 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 



137 




Fig. 78. — Stag's-horn hammer, celts, stone hammers, corn crushers, 
etc. From lake-dwelling, Meilen. 



138 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

merits of rude nets and of "dug-out" trunks, tell 
of a hunting and fishing population, while oth- 
er relics evidence advance to the shepherd and 
farmer stage. The remains at Robenhausen, which 
cover three acres, show that "the litter for the 
cows was chiefly of straw and rushes, and for the 
sheep, pigs, and goats, of sprigs of fir and twigs 
of bushwood." The bones of these animals, and 
of fish caught in the lake, are mingled with those 
of animals of the chase. And further evidence of 
progress is at hand in the stores of grain, of ap- 
ples, pears, seeds, and berries ; in the loaves of 
meal with the mortars or mealing-stones for crush- 
ing it ; in plaited flax and woven nets ; in earthen- 
ware weights for the loom ; in fragments of leath- 
er, and even in wooden lasts for shoes. 

Weaving and plaiting are among the earliest 
arts. The need of securing things together, or 
of otherwise strengthening them, led to binding, 
fastening, and sewing. The wattlework hut, with 
its roof of interlaced boughs, the skin sewn by 
bone needle with sinews, the matted twigs or 
fibres, are all the rough beginnings of an art which 
we can trace step by step. In the twisting of 
fibres or hairs by rolling them between the palms 
of the hand we have the original of the spinning- 
wheel and the steam-driven cotton spindles; in 
the roughest plaiting we have the first hint of the 
most superfine cloth. And these flaxen hanks or 
skeins spun or plaited into cords, these nets and 
woven fabrics of the lake-dwellings, tell of a set- 
tled life in which the " man delved and the woman 
span." 

There, too, were the oldest farmers and stock- 
breeders known to us. The number of animals 
partly or wholly domesticated by them shows 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 1 39 

that the process of taming must have begun ages 
before their arrival in Central Europe; perhaps 
in the regions lying between them and the rude 
ancestry who had tamed only the dog, a creature 
whose social instinct made that task easy. The 
process of selection, which ensures domestication, 
must have ruled from pre-histonc times. Mr. Gal- 
ton's description of it as in operation among bar- 
baric tribes nowadays enables us to picture the 
nomads of the past slowly bringing wild ox, wild 
boar, and other untamed species into subjection. 
He says, " the irreclaimably wild members of 
every flock would escape and be utterly lost; the 
wilder of those that remained would be selected 
for slaughter whenever it was necessary that one 
should be killed. The tamest cattle — those which 
seldom ran away, that kept the flocks together, 
and those which led them homeward— -would be 
preserved alive longer than any of the others. It 
is, therefore, these that chiefly became the parents 
of stock and bequeath their domestic aptitudes to 
the future herd. I have constantly witnessed this 
process of selection among the pastoral savages 
of South Africa. I believe it to be a very impor- 
tant one on account of its rigour and regularity. 
It must have existed from the earliest times, and 
have been in continuous operation down to the 
present day." 

Although we speak of man as first a hunter, 
then a shepherd, and then a farmer, this only 
roughly indicates his advance from the wander- 
ing to the settled state. And these stages are not 
universal, some races being agriculturists, in a 
rude sort of way, from the outset. Agriculture 
may be defined as the domestication of plants, or 
the selection of wild varieties which man discov- 



I40 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

ers to be good for food, although, as contrasted 
with wild animals, many of them can be more 
easily utilised without domestication. The be- 
ginnings of agriculture are too remote for the 
primitive processes to be followed ; but they can 
be observed among barbaric races nowadays and, 
in large degree, in remote parts of civilised coun- 
tries, where the old methods are little altered, 
and the steam plough has not superseded the 
crooked branch. Interest gathers round the ques- 
tion of the sources whence many of our cultivated 
varieties have been derived, and, as usual, the 
East has been pointed to as their native home. 
But although this is true of some, examination of 
deposits in Europe has shown that others were 
indigenous. The connection between agriculture 
and religion has been unbroken from pre-historic 
times. Grant Allen, in an ingenious paper pub- 
lished in the Fortnightly Review of May, 1894, 
argues that cultivation began with the accidental 
sowing of grains upon the tumuli of the dead, be- 
cause it would not occur to primitive man to save 
the seeds and bury them in the soil on the bare 
chance of their sprouting and producing seeds 
after their kind. Seeing that this happened on 
graves, he would conclude that the grateful ghost 
beneath had thus repaid him an hundredfold the 
offerings he had made. Step by step the land 
about the tumuli would be cleared and cultivated, 
but always with the provision of a corpse, or frag- 
ments of a corpse, buried in the soil as the condi- 
tion of fertility. " With the gradual mitigation of 
savagery an animal sacrifice was often substituted 
for a human one ; but the fragments of the animal 
were still distributed through the fields with a 
mimic or symbolical burial . . . the idea of the 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 



141 



crop being a gift from the deified ancestor or the 
divine human victim being kept up in the common 
habit of offering the first fruits to the dead, or to 
the gods, or to the living chief, their representa- 
tive and descendant." The theory is illustrated 
by striking examples of customs connected with 
the worship of the dead, and, in so far, has much 
to commend it. But seeds sprout on other places 
besides graves, and it needed no very careful ob- 
servation on the part of primitive man to note so 
common an occurrence, while he would attribute 
it to the spirit which, as has been shown, he be- 
lieved to dwell in every- 
thing. All around him 
was the magic outcome 
of life, whether from 
the womb, or the egg y 
or the seed : the cease- 
less succession of birth, 
growth, and death ; and 
after that, and ever- 
more, birth, growth, and 
death. Throughout the 
religions of barbaric 
races we find worship 
of the spirit of each 
plant, as the " grass- 
spirit," " corn-spirit," 
the " maize-spirit," the 
" tobacco-spirit," and, 
with these, worship of 
sun-god and rain-god, 
without whom the plants would not grow, while, 
chiefest of all, is the great Earth-mother, round 
whose worship the popular rites of every peo- 
ple have gathered. As Tocitzin among the Mexi- 




FlG. 



79. — Ojibwa God of the 
Grass (Dorman). 



142 THE STORY OF U PRIMITIVE' 1 MAN. 

cans, Demeter among the Greeks, and Maia (the 
early earth-worship surviving in May Day and 
kindred festivals) among the Latins ; prayers 
were offered to the fruit and corn-giving " moth- 
er of all." And, as showing how in naught else 
so much as in religion the belief of primitive 
man in spirits in everything survived, it was held 
in old Rome that no bounteous harvest would 
be granted unless the farmer invoked with Moth- 
er Earth and Ceres " the spirit of breaking up the 
land, the spirit of ploughing it crosswise, the 
spirit of furrowing, of ploughing-in the seed, of 
harrowing, of weeding, and of reaping, the spirit 
of carrying the corn to the barn and the spirit 
of bringing it out again." 

As bearing on the stages of culture repre- 
sented in settlements which date from the Neo- 
lithic Age and extend to the Christian Era, it is 
interesting to note that in the oldest series, the 
remains of the stag predominate over the ox, of 
the goat over the sheep, of the wild boar over 
the domestic hog, and of the fox over the dog. 
In settlements referred to the Bronze Age the 
dog predominates over the fox, the domestic hog 
over the wild boar, and the sheep over the goat. 
At the Steinberg, identified from a few iron im- 
plements met with there as one of the later 
villages, numerous bones of the horse are found 
— an animal whose remains are extremely rare 
in the earlier series of dwellings. The absence 
of remains of the hare from the debris is curious, 
as perhaps showing that the prejudice against 
eating its flesh, which Caesar speaks of as existing 
in Britain, extended to Central Europe — a preju- 
dice possibly due to " totemism." The authority 
of Mr. Elton may be cited on this matter. In 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 1 43 

his " Origins of English History" it is remarked 
that " It seems reasonable to connect the rule of 
abstaining from certain kinds of food with the 
superstitious belief that the tribes were descend- 
ed from the animals from which their names 
and crests, or badges, were derived. There are 
several Irish legends which appear to be based 
on the notion that a man might not eat of the 
animal from which he or his tribe was named. 
. . . The hare is now an object of disgust in 
some parts of Russia, as well as in Western Brit- 
tany, where not many years ago the peasants 
could hardly endure to hear its name. The old- 
est Welsh laws contain several allusions to the 
magical character of the hare, which was thought 
to change its sex every month or year, and to 
be the companion of the witches who were be- 
lieved to assume its shape." 

VIII. Origin of the Lake- Dwellers. We have 
travelled a long way from the Thames and Somme 
valleys and the Dordogne and Devonshire cav- 
erns, reaching the Swiss lake shores not only by 
crossing seas where, at starting, none existed, 
but also gaps which only legend and tradition 
fill. Gaps also, though narrower, betv/een the 
men of the kitchen-middens and the men of the 
pile-dwellings, all leading to the question of the 
connection of peoples in pre-historic times. 

The remains of the lake-dwellings indicate 
different stages of civilisation in the same sites. 
Around some of the piles, stone, bronze, and 
also iron articles occur together, showing that 
settlements founded in the early Neolithic Age 
passed without apparent break to the metal 
ages. Like evidence has been obtained from the 
pile-dwellings in the valley of the Po, although 



144 THE STORY OF " PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

these did not survive beyond the age of bronze. 
Thus the dwelling opposite Peschiera, on the 
Lago di Garda, was founded in the Neolithic 
Age, and was in continuous occupation through 
the age of copper to the age of bronze. The 
remains of the settlement in the Lake of Frinon 
exhibit two successive beds, the oldest being 
wholly neolithic. The villagers were mainly in 
the hunting stage, the bones of stags and wild 
boars being abundant, while those of oxen and 
sheep are rare. 

There are no remains of cereals of any kind, 
but great stores of hazel-nuts were found, to- 
gether with acorns, some of them adhering to 
the inside of the pipkins in which they had been 
roasted for food. The settlement seems to have 
been burnt, and then after a time rebuilt, the 
newer relic-bed containing numerous flint chips 
and a solitary bronze axe. Cereals are still 
absent, although acorns, hazel-nuts, and cornel 
cherries are found. But the pastoral stage had 
plainly been reached, since the bones of the stag 
and the wild boar become rare, while those of 
the ox and sheep are common. 

The alternative, therefore, is that the lake- 
dwellings were either inhabited from their foun- 
dation to their disappearance by the same race 
which gradually passed from the use of stone 
to that of metal, acquiring this by barter; or 
that they were invaded by a superior race armed 
with bronze weapons : a race which conquered 
the lake-dwellers, drove them into the wilds, 
or perhaps exterminated them (that is, if any 
race in Europe ever was exterminated), and oc- 
cupied their settlements. Until recently it was 
taken for granted by well-nigh every writer on 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 145 

the subject that the latter alternative was the 
true one. Everything came in the train of the 
Wise Men from the East : the birthplace of 
mankind, the cradle of civilisation. Ancient 
traditions lay at the base of this unchallenged 
theory, and confirmation of it appeared certain 
in the interesting discovery of a close family 
relation between the languages spoken by the 
leading peoples of Europe and by the dominant 
peoples of India and Persia. The dissection of 
words, and of the roots from which they spring, 
evidenced that from the mother " Aryan " or 
" Indo-European " tongue there had descended 
the rich and vigorous languages in which are 
written the Vedas, or sacred books of the Hin- 
dus; the Avesta-Zend, or sacred books of the 
Parsis ; the Iliad and Odyssey ; the Eddas ; the 
Divina Commedia ; and the plays of Shakspere. 
Also that the people who spoke this mother- 
tongue lived somewhere east of the Caspian 
Sea in a fairly advanced state of civilisation at 
a period when Europe was a jungle inhabited by 
the men of the kitchen-middens and the earliest 
lake-dwellings. Sanskrit, the language in which 
the Vedas are written, was adjudged to be 
nearest of all to the original tongue, and the 
oldest member of the family of speech derived 
from it. It was therefore argued that the prim- 
itive home of the Aryans (using this term not 
as a race-name, but to denote people speaking 
allied languages) was in Central Asia, whence 
swarmed, one after another, the various tribes : 
some southward, through the passes of the 
Hindu Kush into India, some into Persia; others 
by routes north of the Caspian Sea into Russia 
and Central Europe,, or, south of that sea, into 
10 



146 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

Greece and Italy. The first to arrive were the 
Celts, who, in the course of time, were driven 
westwards to the extreme corners of Europe by 
the forefathers of the Germans and Slavs; the 
tribes that took a more southerly path being 
the ancestors of the Greeks and Romans. Thus 
was it all made clear that peoples now as diverse 
as the Hindu and Icelander, the Greek and 
German, the Persian and Englishman, and the 
Russian and the Irishman, are the offspring of 
a mother-race that nurtured them on the high- 
lands of Asia, and sent them forth, one by one, 
as more elbow room was needed, to conquer 
and to civilise. And, therefore, it was to these 
Aryans that the introduction of a higher culture 
among the lake-dwellers, or such of them as, 
according to old notions, were not exterminated, 
was due. 

All this sounds very plausible— indeed, has a 
dash of the poetic in it, but it is, as idylls often 
are, largely a work of imagination, so far as the 
cradle or primitive home of the Aryans is con- 
cerned. It rests 011 the fallacy that identity of 
language implies identity of race. Whereas, as 
Professor Rhys says, " skulls are harder than con- 
sonants," and while the hall-mark of race is never 
wholly rubbed out, its language is as unstable as 
the sea-waves. Numerous causes operate to bring 
about change; conquering races, or intermixture 
with races of superior culture, effect it, often 
sweeping away the old language, and imposing 
a new language upon an intellectually inferior, 
even though physically superior, race. Languages 
prove social contact, but blood-alliance. The 
Jews, while keeping themselves distinct as a race, 
have adopted the language of the various coun- 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 147 

tries in which they have settled; the Cornishmen 
and Bretons are largely of the same blood, but 
their language is different; and although the 
French and Italian languages point to descent 
from a common tongue, it does not follow that 
Frenchmen and Italian are the offspring of com- 
mon ancestors. 

But, even if it could be granted that language 
is a test of race, the evidence that Sanskrit and 
Zend, as the speech of the ancient Asiatic Aryan, 
are most nearly allied to the primitive Aryan 
tongue, is disputed. Sanskrit, the language of the 
Hindu scriptures and Zend, as the language of the 
Persian scriptures, are no longer spoken, whereas 
the Icelandic and Lithuanian tongues are not only 
still spoken, but have the best claims to represent 
the Aryan mother-tongue; those, for example, 
who speak Lithuanian " being probably the direct 
descendants of those who spoke it two, or possibly 
three, thousand years ago." 

Language alone, then, has been made the basis 
of a theory of successive immigrations of Asiatics 
from warmer regions over frozen steppes or across 
tempestuous inland seas, followed by the extinc- 
tion of non-Aryan Europeans. Now we find the 
main body of Aryan-speaking peoples in Europe, 
and only a small-detached body in Asia — the 
main trunk here, two severed branches there. 
The conclusion therefrom is not that the larger 
mass broke away from the smaller, but the 
smaller from the larger. " The European Aryans 
form a closely united circular chain of six links,, 
but there is one vacant place — one link is miss- 
ing from the chain. This missing link is dis-^ 
covered far away in Asia, where we find the Indo- - 
Iranians, who are very closely united with each 



148 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

other, but whose affinities with the European 
Aryans are chiefly with the Slavs on the one hand, 
and with the Greeks on the other. They clearly 
constitute the missing link in the chain. " 

It is highly probable that the races who spoke 
the Aryan mother-tongue were scattered over 
Europe at the not very remote period when Asia 
Minor was joined to Europe at a point where the 
Bosphorus now flows. The waters of the Black 
Sea were then united to the Caspian and Aral Seas 
and to Lake Balkash, forming one vast inlan'd sea, 
which overflowed northward through the basin of 
the Oti into the Arctic Ocean. With the wearing 
away of the isthmus between Europe and Asia 
Minor the waters of the Black Sea poured through 
what is now the Dardanelles to the Mediterranean, 
and, with the warmer climate and drier air, brought 
about by the slow upheaval of Siberia, the Cas- 
pian, the Aral, and the Balkash waters shrunk 
under more rapid evaporation to their present 
size, laying bare the wide, salt-laden wastes that 
now spread between them. Across the broad 
plains there passed eastward some of the Aryan 
tribes, ancestors of Hindus and Persians. 

Of course language is a test of race among 
people who have had no foreign tongue imposed 
upon them; and, to the extent that the same 
things are called by the same names among 
people now widely scattered it is a proof of 
former contact, and, in high degree, of blood- 
relationship. And as giving the clue to what 
were their thoughts and material possessions, it 
helps us to estimate what stage of culture they 
had reached before they separated. Where the 
same thing is called by different names in the 
separated branches we conclude that it became 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 149 

known to each independently after the separa- 
tion. Where the name of anything is present in 
one branch and absent in the other, we draw the 
same conclusion. A few examples will show 
the bearing of this on our knowledge of the 
primitive Aryan civilisation, and on the relative 
periods when contact between the several peoples 
was more infrequent until it finally ended. 

The beech does not grow east of a line draw r n 
from the south of Scandinavia through Poland 
to the Crimea and Caucasus. The name for it is 
common to the Celtic, Teutonic, Greek, and Latin 
languages, but has been borrowed from the Teu- 
tonic by the Slavonic, and is absent from the In- 
dian and Persian languages. The tree is unknown 
in Central Asia, and so it would follow that the 
Eastern branch of the Aryans had migrated 
thither after the period when the beech had begun 
to replace the oak in Denmark. And this was not 
till the " Age of Iron." 

Pastoral people divide the year into two sea- 
sons — the one when the cattle are fed in the open, 
the other when they are housed in the stall. And 
among the Aryan languages we find common 
words for summer and winter, winter being the 
season most sharply defined; "both these," as 
Tacitus says in his " Germania," " have a meaning ; 
but the name and blessings of autumn are alike 
unknown." This implies the absence of an in- 
gathering season, and therefore of a definite agri- 
cultural stage, as indicated in the terms used 
later ; e. g., in the German herbst, or " harvest- 
time." The related words for the sea appear only 
in the European group, but the names for rowing 
and boat are identical in both that and the 
Asiatic group. The name for the oyster is the 



ISO THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

same in the European branch, but it is absent 
from the Asiatic. The names for the dog, cow, 
sheep, and horse (which animal was eaten, but, per- 
haps, not yet then domesticated) are alike, and 
the possession of cattle among the undivided 
Aryans is shown in the common name, which goes 
back to a root meaning " capture. " The domesti- 
cated animals were denoted as the " tied up," in 
contrast to wild animals. The herds were the 
primitive standard of value, as evidenced in the 
words " pecuniary " (Lat pecunia ; from pecus y 
cattle), and " fee " (Anglo-Sax. feoh, which means 
both " gold " and " cattle "). Among the Romans 
ten sheep equalled an ox. When, in the metal 
age, copper supplanted cattle as the measure of 
value, the bars were stamped with images of a 
cow, sheep, or dog. The waggon, drawn by oxen, 
was one of the earliest inventions, and we there- 
fore find common names for the wheel and axle. 
These were made out of a tree-trunk cut cross- 
ways. The primitive boat was a hand-paddled 
tree-trunk, which was afterwards scooped-out by 
stone axes with the help of fire. The common 
Indo-European word for " tree-trunk " and " boat " 
is the same, and, in extended meaning, for " sacred 
tree-trunk " and " temple." For woods and 
groves — the haunts of man primeval — are the old- 
est temples in all forest countries. Grimm says, 
" What we conceive of as a house built and walled- 
in passes, the further we go into early times, into 
the idea of holy ground hedged in and surrounded 
by self-grown trees." Motion Js life ; where there 
is life there is spirit ^ that is primitive man's uni- 
versal way of looking at things. Trees grow and 
blossom ; bring forth fruit ; bleed and moan when 
cut; wither; and die. An old writer says that 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 15 1 

" when an oake is falling, before it falles it gives 
a kind of shriekes or groanes, as if it were the 
genius, or spirit, of the oake lamenting. Hence 
the belief that they have souls, a belief shared even 
by the early Greek philosophers, because of the 
movements and the sounds which trees make. By 
stages easy to follow, the tree became a god, whose 
life was connected with that of the tree. This 
tree-spirit was next incarnated in a human being, 
whose life and vigour ruled that of all vegetation, 
so that were he suffered to live on till he was old 
and decrepit, the trees and plants would become 
barren, and the earth would yield no harvest. 
Therefore he was killed ere that could happen, 
as among the Congo natives, who, believing that 
if their chief priest were to die a natural death 
the world would perish, clubbed or strangled him 
on the first signs of serious illness, so that his 
spirit might be transferred to a younger or 
healthier man. Still more apposite to this was 
the ancient custom in the grove sacred to Diana, 
at Nemi, near Rome, the priest of which could 
secure that office only by killing the man vho 
held it, and had, therefore, to be always on the 
alert, lest he was slain himself. For he was be- 
lieved to be the incarnation of the tree-spirit, on 
whom the fruitfulness of the soil depended. If 
he became decrepit, then the earth would become 
unfertile ; so, when he was unable to hold his post 
against attack, he was killed, and his power and 
vigour, as the tree-spirit, was believed to pass into 
his successor. Strange as this reads, it is related 
to a vast body of customs which attended and 
still attend the worship of tree-life, to the bring- 
ing of offerings, to the holding of festivals, and to 
the belief in trees as connected with oracles and 



152 THE STORY OF " PRIMITIVE " MAN. 

divination. The Indians will consult their sorcer- 
ers as to the message of the tree which shook the 
most; the Hebrews had their tree of u sooth- 
sayers " and " revealers," and the prophetess Deb- 
orah gave her answers under a palm near Bethel 
which tradition marked as the grave of the nurse 
of Rachel — one of many holy trees by burial 
places — while among the Greeks the rustling of the 
leaves of the sacred oak of Zeus at Dodona was 
interpreted as the voice of the god. In neolithic 
times that tree held the supreme place in nature- 
worship in Europe, doubtless because it formed 
most of the dense forests, and it was by the rub- 
bing of its wood that the sacred fires were kindled. 
The ash ranked next to the oak in the honour 
paid it. But an end must be made of references 
to a tempting subject which further shows that 
we cannot handle any side of primitive belief 
without touching every other side. 

Returning to a few more examples of the evi- 
dence from language, we find in the identity of 
the word for " plough " and " branch " that the 
original implement was a crooked bough. Cer- 
tain parts of it were named after animals, as 
in Sanskrit, where the word for "wolf's teeth" 
and the " plough," as a tearing implement, is the 
same ; and in Old Irish, where soc means " plough- 
share " and a pig's snout," an appropriate term 
for a machine used in rooting-up the closely-mat- 
ted forest soil of Europe. The words for barley, 
wheat, and flax agree in all the Aryan languages. 
The names of the camel and the ass are loan- 
words; that is, they were borrowed from non- 
Aryan speaking people by the Asiatic Aryans, and 
so passed on to Europe. For both animals are 
natives of the East, and their taming, as probably 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 153 

also that of the horse, was effected, by the nomadic 
races of the wide tracts of Central Asia or the 
deserts of Arabia. The names of the lion and 
tiger are absent from the Aryan languages; the 
larger cave-lion was extinct long before neolithic 
times, but the range of the living species included 
southeastern Europe within historical times. The 
conclusion from this is that neither lion nor tiger 
were known to the primitive Aryans. 

By the help of the materials of which the fore- 
going are only random samples, some picture of 
the culture of the Aryans or Indo-Europeans is 
possible. As indicated, the long-accepted theory 
of their origin in Asia is practically abandoned 
in favour of the theory which places their primi- 
tive home in some locality between the Baltic 
shores and the Ural mountains. It is by no means' 
improbable that their remote ancestors were the 
men of the Danish shell-mounds who in the course 
of thousands of years spread themselves over 
Europe. Miserable was their first condition ; as 
low as that of the Chauci of the German fenlands 
thus graphically described by Pliny : " In their 
huts upon the banks they look like sailors aboard 
ship when the tide is in, and like shipwrecked 
men at the ebb ; and they hunt the fish around 
their hovels as they try to escape with the tide. 
They have no cattle, and so they cannot live on 
milk like their neighbours, nor can they even fight 
with wild beasts when every stick is carried out 
to sea. They weave fishing-nets out of sea-tangle 
and rushes, and they pick up handfuls of mud, 
which they dry in the wind — for they have not 
much sunshine, and so they make a fire to scorch 
their food, and their bodies too all stiffened by the 
cold of the north." From the loins of these rude, 



154 THE STORY OF " PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

hardy folk sprang some of the makers of the 
English nation, and as the men of the kitchen- 
middens had made the first start in domesticating 
animals by training the dog, they would by degree 
subdue the animals which roamed the thickets, 
yoke the oxen to their rude waggons, and cut their 
way through forests with their roughly ground 
axes. Clearings would be made in the tangled 
woods ; the tree-plough would tear up the soil in 
which the seeds were to be planted, and, with 
them, the seeds of a settled condition which, 
among these neolithic people, reached its highest 
stage in the lake-dwellings. There the " tied-up " 
animals formed their staple wealth in supply of 
clothing, meat, and milk. For stronger drink 
they had mead, prepared from wild honey, a 
liquor still known in rural districts. In Northern 
Europe this was supplanted by beer, the name be- 
ing retained in our word " ale " (Old German alu y 
"mead"). It is interesting and amusing to find 
Pytheas, the " Humboldt of antiquity," in de- 
scribing British beer, remarking that the Greek 
physicians warned their patients against it, as 
"producing pain in the head and injury to the 
nerves." 

The pastoral life, with its care of flocks and 
herds, and easy provision of food and clothing 
which these afforded, is far less laborious than the 
tilling of the soil with its uncertainties and disap- 
pointments. Only the pressure of population and 
the resulting insufficiency of pastures, which can- 
not support beyond a given number, compelled 
the cultivation of the land. Man is by nature and 
habit a roving animal ; as late as the times of 
Thucydides (fifth century b. c.) the Greeks are 
described as rilled with the nomad instinct ; and 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 155 

Strabo, writing four centuries later, speaks of the 
Germans as careful only to provide for the needs 
of the day, " to live in waggons and move their 
cattle where they like." 

The social relations were of course more de- 
veloped as settled conditions w T ere reached, but 
before any great divergence of the Aryans oc- 
curred the several degrees of kinship by blood 
and marriage were already recognised. The 
family is the unit of society, not only when the 
ties between the parents are loose and temporary, 
so that descent is reckoned on the mother's side, 
but also when totemism, or scarcity of women, 
leading to their forcible capture, rule the choice 
of mates. Among the Aryans wives were obtained 
first by seizure ; afterwards by purchase ; a sur- 
vival of which latter custom is seen in the occa- 
sional sale of a wife among the lower orders, 
under the delusion that the transaction is valid. 
The husband and father had supreme power over 
the household ; at his will the useless aged were 
killed ; and with him rested the decision whether 
or not the newborn babes should be reared or " ex- 
posed," a custom which survived among Norse- 
men, Gauls, Greeks, and Romans. It also pre- 
vails to this day, more especially in the murder of 
female infants, among semi-barbarous people, as 
the Chinese, and among wholly barbaric tribes. 
The wife was the husband's property, and custom 
■ — based upon those supposed needs of the dead 
which have been already referred to — compelled 
her self-slaughter at his grave, and also the killing 
of slaves, who, as prisoners of war — the great 
nation-maker — were divided among the victors. 

The collection of families into " gentes " or 
bands of " blood-brothers," must have taken place 



156 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

at a very early period. At the bottom of the 
scale it was never wholly the selfish code: "each 
for himself, and the devil take the hindmost." 
Among the men of the river-drift and the cavern 
the interests of the family made for unity, and 
subordinated its welfare to that of the gens. 
The gentes combined into tribes under a rex or 
" ruler," who led them in war and saw that the 
law — based on custom, the same word originally 
denoting both — was duly kept. The "moot" or 
meeting-place was on some natural or artificial 
hill where, perchance, the dead lay buried ; where 
the altar was reared, and the rude temple raised 
above it. The connection of law and religion has 
been intimate from ancient times. Mommsen 
tells how the representatives of justice assembled 
on the Mount of Alba when the Latins gathered 
for religious festival ; and in the Brehon Laws 
(the ancient code of Ireland) the rare penalty of 
death was inflicted upon the wilful disturber of 
"any lawfully constituted assembly." The la- 
bour of clearing the ground for cultivation was 
shared by the village community," aided by slaves, 
and therefore at the outset the land was public 
property, the establishment of private rights 
based on a man's " realty " (or " reality ") being 
later. 

To enlarge this sketch would be to attempt 
the impossible task of compressing the history 
of civilisation among settled folk into a few pages. 
For although the Indo-Europeans represent only 
one among other civilising peoples, and are, in 
fact, largely indebted to these, their history is 
that of the nations who have most profoundly 
influenced, or whose successors most profoundly 
influence, the destinies of mankind. It is this 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 157 

fact that has warranted the prominence given to 
them in this book of outlines, while the highest 
interest attaches to them as possibly later links 
in an unbroken chain of man's occupancy of 
Europe. 

Brevity is apt to mislead, so let the caution be 
given that the foregoing summary of the leading 
features of Aryan civilisation does not imply a 
uniform stage among the several peoples. Very 
complex and subtle are the causes arresting or 
quickening progress, causes lying too remote for 
analysis; but we know from the relative state of 
civilisation of Celt and Teuton, and of Greek and 
Roman, at the dawn of history, what advances 
the southern peoples had made, as compared with 
the northern. 

These latter, as we learn from the narratives 
of classic writers, and from the known course of 
events in north-western Europe, had not passed 
beyond the semi-barbaric stage centuries after 
the Greeks had defeated the Persians under 
Xerxes at Salamis, and after the Romans had 
laid the foundations of their mighty empire on 
the Palatine Hill. Very early, therefore, as the 
need of more elbow-room drove the various 
branches further afield, the ancestors of the 
Mediterranean peoples had migrated from the 
northern region described in the Odyssey, among 
other memories of a barbaric past, as the land 
where the Cimmerians dwell " shrouded in mist 
and cloud, and never does the shining sun look 
down on them with his rays, neither when he 
climbs up the starry heavens, nor when again 
he turns earthward from the firmament, but 
deadly night is outspread over miserable mor- 
tals.'' 



158 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

Yet the Greeks were moderns as compared 
with their Eastern neighbours. When, in the 
sixth century b. c, Solon, their celebrated states- 
man, visited Egypt, the priests of Sais said to 
him, "You Greeks are but children. " For the 
valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates were the 
seats of civilisations which had reached their 
zenith long before daydawn in the West. The 
vast cereal-yielding Asian plains supported 
swarming populations among whom, under the 
sway of tyrant kings, there flourished arts and 
sciences, agriculture, and the use of metals. 
There, too, were developed great religions whose 
creeds and ceremonies have become parts of later 
old-world faiths. These civilisations had not 
appeared suddenly, fully equipped as Minerva 
from the brain of Zeus, but had grown out of an 
^earlier culture which was probably Mongolian. 
About the race thus named much is dark and 
mysterious; but to it seems traceable a stage 
of civilisation which ranged from Asia Minor to 
China, and which spread across Malaysia to the 
island groups of the Pacific. 

It may be safely estimated that the civilisations 
nearest to Europe were in a flourishing state at 
least 2000 to 2500 years b. c. And it is clear 
that the Phoenicians, as the great traders of the 
ancient world, who had planted their settlements 
along the Mediterranean sea-board, brought to 
the dwellers on those shores much of the culture 
of the East. Other channels doubtless opened 
interchange of ideas between Egyptian and 
Greek and other peoples ; but whatever Greece, 
the transmitter or originator of every fruitful 
idea in the modern world, received and adopted, 
she stamped with a character all her own. As 



THE NEWER STONE AGE. 159 

the Hindu proverb says, " every spoke of the 
wheel comes up in its turn," and when the sun 
set on Asia, the vast, the dreamy, and the stolid, 
the traces of whose greatness men are disinter- 
ring from rubbish heaps, it rose on the active, 
practical Western world. 

The origin of man in America is an insoluble , 
problem, but much is to be said in support of 
the theory that he reached there both by way of 
Behring Straits and by creeping along the coast 
of Indo-Malaysia and Eastern Asia. The Indians 
still voyage hundreds of miles in frail canoes, 
and what such folk can do is the measure of 
capacity of barbaric man in the past to have 
done likewise. 

Such migration from the shores of the Indian 
Ocean, if it took place, reaches back to a time 
when Palaeolithic man was living in Europe, and 
when Asia was still in the Stone Age, because, 
among other reasons, a lapse of time long 
enough for the development of the ninety lan- 
guages spoken by the North and South Ameri- 
can Indians is required. As for Africa, Egypt 
(which seems scarcely to belong to her), and the 
northern sea-board excepted, the races there, iso- 
lated by the desert wastes, must during pre-his- 
toric times have worked out their slow but soon 
arrested advance above the lowest savagery. 



160 THE STORY OF ''PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

CHAPTER V. 

THE AGE OF METALS. 

Following the art of fire, the two chief 
agents in man's progress have been the discov- 
ery of metals and of the power of steam. Upon 
this later discovery of the two, only the passing 
remark can here be made that until the power of 
steam was known the means of transit had not 
sensibly improved since pre-historic times. 

The revolution wrought by metals is the 
greatest that the world has yet seen or that it 
will ever see. No wonder that round these 
treasures of the earth, gathered from the glitter- 
ing sands or smelted from the deep rock, there 
gathered many a myth and legend which 
ascribed them to the gods; which told of the 
wondrous smiths — as Tubal Cain, Hephaestus, 
or Vulcan, Ilmarinen, and Wieland or Wayland 
— and which filled the underworld with cunning 
workmen, gnomes and fairies, and guardians of 
hidden riches. 

It is said that the origin of paying tithes on 
minerals is due to the belief that the ore is a liv- 
ing organism. The clergy of past times either 
shared or fostered the delusion, because tithe 
was only payable on products of the earth which 
renewed themselves annually, and these were 
said to include ore in the vein. 

In Finnish myth iron was said to originate 
from sprouts, probably through the observation 
that bog-iron ore, which has a spongy texture, 
assumes tree-like forms. " When once this was 
assimilated in thought to the vegetable kingdom, 



THE AGE OF METALS. l6l 

it had to be watered and nourished like any other 
plant. This gave rise to the development of the 
story by an incident in which the daughters of 
Nature spilt milk upon a marsh." 

When the neolithic people drove their piles 
into the lakes of Switzerland and Italy and 
Thrace, Europe was covered with dense forests. 
The oak and the fir grew as far south as Greece, 
the vine had long flourished in Southern Europe, 
but the olive had not yet been brought from its 
Syrian home. Only when and wherever there 
was placed in man's hand the hard, sharp-edged 
bronze or iron axe could he make quick clearance 
of the trees and hew his path to that goal of 
civilisation which he could never have reached 
by stone implements. 

Controversy has gathered about the unim- 
portant question whether gold or copper was the 
earliest metal known. River gold would attract 
attention, and it may have been known to the 
primitive Aryans ; but the more frequent outcrop 
of copper in certain regions, where traces of 
early settlements occur, point to it as the primi- 
tive metal. Its use in a native state everywhere 
preceded its use as a compound in the form 
of bronze. Although generally found in small 
quantities, large masses have been obtained from 
Russia and from the shores of Lake Superior, 
where blocks weighing several hundred tons 
have been more than once discovered. As 
shown already, North America supplies the best 
evidence of a Copper Ag e, the mound-builders 
breaking off the metal as needed and hammering 
it cold into the required shape, modelling this on 
the stone tools and weapons used side by side 
with it. " Accustomed to the use of stone, they 



162 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

would at first regard the metal as merely a stone 
of peculiarly heavy nature, and on attempting to 
chip it or work it into shape would at once dis- 
cover that it yielded to a blow instead of break- 
ing; that in fact it was a malleable stone. Of 
this ductile property the North American, savage 
availed himself largely, and was able .to.-pcoduce 
spear-heads'wTth sockets adapted for the recep- 
tion of their shafts by merely hammering out the 
base of the spear-head and turning it over to 
form the socket, in the same manner as is so 
often employed in the making of iron tools." 
That he should not have smelted the metal is 
curious, because the fires upon the altars were 
intense enough to melt down the copper imple- 
ments and ornaments laid upon them, so that 
the mound-builders "may in one sense be said 
to have been in an age of stone, since they used 
the copper, not as metal, but as stone." 

Turning to the old world, copper celts of a 
simple form have been found in Central India, 
Switzerland, and Hungary, and, as should be ex- 
pected, since that island has given its name to 
the metal, in Cyprus. One specimen found in 
an Etruscan tomb, and now in the Berlin 
Museum, is of the shape of an ordinary stone 
celt, having been probably cast in a mould 
formed upon the more primitive implement. 
That the new is the offspring of the old is well 
exampled in the story of the archaeologist who 
picked up a fine bronze celt and carried it off in 
high glee to a brother antiquary. The friend 
looked at it, and said, " Yes, it's a good specimen, 
and old too; but I've something older: the 
mould in which it was cast," and bringing out 
his find, fitted the one into the other. 



THE AGE OF METALS. 163 

But the use of copper in a native state was 
only intermediate. Its real utility began with the 
discovery that by mixing a certain proportion of 
tin (or in some instances zinc, lead, or, more 
rarely, silver) with it, a hard and tough material 
resulted. Where and when this simple but im- 
portant discovery was made is unknown. Com- 
mon opinion leans to the theory that bronze 
was introduced into Central Europe about 1500 
b. c. from the Mediterranean through Phoenician 
traders. But if this be so, we are no nearer 
knowledge of the source whence Phoenicia ob- 
tained her copper supply. It appears not unlikely 
that bronze may have reached Europe by a more 
northerly, or north-easterly route, as abundant 
remains of copper procured from the Ura and 
Altai mountains have been found in the " kur- 
gans " or burial mounds of the semi-legendary 
u Tschudes," scattered over the plains of North- 
ern Asia. As regards tin, there is well-nigh com- 
mon agreement that the Cassiterides or " Tin 
Islands " (Greek kassiteros, tin), which are iden- 
tified with Cornwall and the Scilly Isles, were an 
early and abundant source of supply to the Phoe- 
nician voyagers. An interesting discovery was 
made some few years ago in the dredging up of 
a large \-{ -shaped ingot of tin in Falmouth har- 
bour. Its form adapts it for being laid in the 
keel of a boat or slung on a horse's side, two in- 
gots thus forming a load for a pack-horse. From 
certain references in the old geographers it 
seems that the tin was carried from Cornwall 
to the Isle of Thanet, which was then part of the 
mainland, and thence shipped by short passage 
to Gaul. " This," as Professor Rhys remarks, 
"would explain Csesar's singular statement that 



1 64 THE STORY OF <l PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

British tin came from the inland parts of the 
country." 

Three methods of casting bronze implements 
were adopted. T he earlies t was to pour thejnol- 
ten metal into a pattern cut into stone or into an 
impression made by a stone celt on a mould of 
loam or clay. An advance upon this would be a 
double mould of these or some harder material ; 
and the next step would be to that of a solid 
mould by~pTacing a model of the implement in 
w ax, wood, or othe r combustible substance T and 
encasing it in some porous non-combustible sub- 
stance. The exposure to fire would burn out the 
model and leave a cavity into which the molten 
metal was poured, reproducing the design. Al- 




Fig. 8o.— Flanged celt, Fig. 8 r.— Flat celt, Butterwick, York- 
Noriolk {Evans). shire {Evans). 

though the reference lies outside our subject, 
visitors to Pompeii may remember that by pour- 



THE AGE OF METALS. 1 65 

ing liquid plaster of Paris into the hollows 
occupied by the skeletons of the victims of the 
eruption, and letting it harden, perfect casts of 
the bodies in the clothes which they wore when 
overtaken by the engulfing ashes were obtained. 
The bronze workers ornamented their decorated 
objects with circles, spirals, and zigzags of a more 
or less uniform design, figures of animals or 
plants being rarely attempted. But the skill and 
symmetry shown in the treatment of the metal 
evidence no mean advance in art. The fragile 
moulds in burnt clay are seldom found, but more 
or less perfect single moulds are not uncommon. 

The hatch ej^j3r_axe, known as the celt, is the 
most abundant type, and was used both as atooi 
and a_weap_o_n. There is the flat or simpleTond ; 
the flanged, or ribbed kind ; the winged, or with 
flanges extended so as to form a socket for the 
handle, and the socketed kind, and of each kind 
there are several varieties. The flat celts are 
the earliest, approaching in character, as already 
observed, to the stone hatchet, and both these 
and the more elaborate kinds sent antiquaries of 
the old school on the wrong tack, just as the 
stone celts and arrow-heads puzzled both ancients 
and moderns. 

Speaking of discoveries near St. Michael's 
Mount, Camden, who lived in the sixteenth cen- 
tury, says: "At the foote of this mountaine 
within the memorie of our Fathers, whiles men 
were digging up of tin, they found Spearheads, 
axes, and swordes of brasse [bronze, by the way, 
is always translated " brass " in the Old Testa- 
ment], wrapped in linnen, such as were some- 
times found within the forrest of Hercinia, in 
Germanie, and not long since in our Wales. 



i66 



THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 



For evident it is by the monuments of ancient 
Writers that the Greeks, the Cimbrians, and the 
Britans, used brazen weapons, although the 
wounds given with brasse bee lesse hurtful, as in 
which mettall there is a medicinable vertue to 
heale, according as Macrobius reporteth out of 
Aristotle. But happily that age was not so cun- 
ning in divising means to mischiefe and murthers 
as ours is." Others conjectured that they were 
chisels for cutting stone for the Roman roads; or 
rests to support the lituus or crooked staff of 

Roman augurs ; or 
tools for the engrav- 
ing of letters and in- 
scriptions ; or the 
sickles with which the 
Druids cut the sacred 
mistletoe. Reference 
to the fantastic no- 
tions of which these 
are specimens is use- 
ful if only as remind- 
ing us how far we 
have travelled nowa- 
days from that sort of 
thing. From what a 
different standpoint 
we look upon the past ! 
The old school had 
learned its lessons 
within the four cor- 
ners of " sacred and profane " history, as it was 
oddly called, and explained all that was curious 
and unfamiliar within those limits. But these di- 
viding lines are now effaced, the antiquity and 
the slow ascent of man demand a margin which 




Fig. 82. — Winged celt, Burnell 
Fen, Cambridge {Evans). 



THE AGE OF METALS. 



167 



melts into the horizon beyond which lie the be- 
ginnings. 

It would neither lighten nor brighten this 
rapid record of the transition from stone to 
metal if a comparison of the various types of 
tools, weapons, and ornaments 
in the several bronze-using 
countries was added. The new 
departure, in placing a new ma- 
terial in the hand of the crafts- 
man, developed his ingenuity 
and fostered that tendency to 
more artistic finish which pre- 
supposes more leisure for the 
work and more refinement in 
the worker. The types vary in 
different countries, those in 
Britain, for example, showing a 
certain degree of originality, but 
the variations can interest only 
experts. The list of objects 
figured in monographs on the 
subject is miscellaneous, com- 
prising, besides the three classes 
of celts — flat, flanged, and sock- 
eted — gouges, tongs, knives, 
awls, sickles, rapiers, daggers, 
halberds, spear-heads, buttons, 
rings, earrings, bracelets, pins, 
and so forth. Some of the sickles- 
rare in Britain, perhaps owing to less cultivation 
of grain there — are elaborately hafted ; the 
swords have pommels inlaid with ivory and am- 
ber ; and the shields have bosses of bold and rich 
design. But of some of these a few specimen 
illustrations are worth pages of description. 




Fig. 83.— Socketed 

celt, Reach Ftn, 
Cambridge {Evans). 

-an implement 



168 



THE STORY OF " PRIMITIVE" MAN. 



The value of the relics in the Swiss lake- 
dwellings as contributions to our knowledge 
of the metal-using period is especially evident. 
The villages assigned to the Bronze Age de- 
crease in number as that metal becomes super- 
seded by iron. They are situated chiefly in Cen- 
tral and Western Switzerland, and they differ little 
in general character from those of the Stone 
Age, except in being, in some instances, farther 
from the land, perhaps because construction 
became easier, and also, perhaps, because with 
universal improvement in weapons the risks of 
attack were greater. 

The occurrence of highly ornamented brace- 




Fig. 84. — Late Celtic bracelet, Cowlam, Yorkshire {Evans), 



lets among the relics in the lake-bottoms has led 
to the suggestion that they may have been thrown 



THE AGE OF METALS. 1 69 

into the water as offerings to the spirits whom 
barbaric people believe dwell in river, lake, and 
ocean. We have nothing to guide us to definite 
knowledge of the religion of the lake folk, but 
there is good reason for assuming that they prac- 
tised the nature-worship already described, and 
therefore that they worshipped water as the home 
both of maliceful and helpful deities. 

If the dead, dull stones were believed to have 
spirits within them, still more so would this seem 




Fig. 85. — Bracelet with cup- Fig. 86. — Bronze ear-ring, 

shaped ends, Co. Cavan Cowlam, Yorkshire (£vans). 

{Jzvans). 

true of water, whose every motion denotes the 
presence of life, and of perennial youth and 
strength. The fury of the wind-tossed sea ; the 
boiling and seething of the tumbling cataract ; 
the swirling of the rapid ; the swift current of the 
river; each with its own voice, were all outward 
and visible signs of the spirits within. Helpful 
or harmful, as the things which they did showed 
them to be, it was they who seized the drowning 
as their prey, and swallowed whatever was offered 
them ; who dried up the springs and streams, or 



170 THE STORY OF " PRIMITIVE » MAN. 

who laved the land so that the earth brought 
forth her increase ; who gave food to man in the 
supply of fish, and who swept away the disease 




Fig. 87. — Brooch, Cowlam, Yorkshire {Evans), 

demons and carried them to the great sea. So the 
Peruvians believed, when, on the arrival of the 
rainy and unhealthy season, they drove the fever- 
bringing spirits with shouts and brandishing of 
lances to the river-banks, that they might be 
banished to the ocean. So among the ancient 
Babylonians, the patients bathing in the Eu- 
phrates besought the river to carry away their 
disease, and " bear it down the stream." So, 
within the last few years (as perhaps they still do 
in secret to this day), the Manx peasants repaired 
to sea and wells for ailments, believing in the 
miraculous power of the water if used " while the 
books are open at church," that is, during divine 
service. Everywhere we meet with a belief in 
great gods of ocean, sea, and mighty river, and 
in godlings of the minor streams, pools, and 
springs. 

" A blind people," wrote old Gildas, " paid di- 
vine honour to the mountains, wells, and streams," 
and in the old Celtic religion the rivers were spe- 
cially identified with certain gods and goddesses. 
The full rivers were " mothers " who brought 
them food ; in the whirling eddy the water-demons 



THE AGE OF METALS. 



171 



lurked; the lake was ruled by a lonely queen, 
and every well had its nymph. Among the sea- 
gods were, among others, Nodens, to whom a 
temple was built, as late as the time of the Ro- 
man occupation, at Lydney, on the banks of the 




Fig. 88. — Sea ghost, from a native Melanesian drawing 
{Codringio?i). 

Severn; and Ludd, whose name perhaps survives 
in Lud-gate ; St. Paul's Cathedral, as some think, 
marking the site of a temple to him. These cor- 
respond to Neptune among the Romans, and to 
Poseidon, Nereus, Proteus, and other gods among 
the Greeks, who had their nymphs in ordered 



172 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

rank: the Oceanides, daughters of Oceanus; the 
Nereides, dwellers in cool cave and grotto, daugh- 
ters of Nereus; and the fresh-water Naiades, 
nymphs of springs and streams. Thus, so it 
would seem, did the old nature-worship of the 
lake-dwellers survive in this and other forms, 
among Celt and Greek and Roman. For in re- 
ligions there are no inventions, only survivals. 
" Father Thames " and " Father Tiber " show how 
old myths are preserved till they ultimately be- 
come figures of speech, and as for the army of 
water spirits, their names remain as legion : from 
malicious kelpies to bewitching mermaids. We 
need not travel to Africa or New Grenada or 
Peru for examples of sacrifices to the water to 
ensure a good catch; since we find these among 
the fisher folk of the Scottish isles, of which a 
traveller records example when the inhabitants of 
Lewis, addressing a sea-god called Shony, throw 
a cup of ale into the sea " hoping for plenty of 
sea-ware." And the belief that it is unlucky to 
save a drowning man, thus cheating the water- 
demon of his lawful prey, is not confined to the 
Hindus and Malays and Kamschadals, but is 
found among Bohemians and St. Kilda islanders. 
In Scott's " Pirate," Bryce the pedlar warns Mor- 
daunt against saving a shipwrecked sailor: "Are 
you mad," said he, "you that have lived sae lang 
in Zetland, to risk the saving of a drowning man ? 
Wot ye not, if you bring him to life again, he will 
be sure to do you some capital injury ? " 

As illustrating the identification of rivers with 
certain divine beings among the Celts, there are 
those that still bear the name of Dee or Deva and 
kindred ones. " As late as the time of Giraldus 
the Dee was supposed to indicate beforehand the 



THE AGE OF METALS. 1 73 

event of the frequent wars between the Welsh 
and English by eating away its bank on the Welsh 
or on the English side, as the case may be. The 
name of another river marks it out as one that 
was formerly considered divine, the Belisama, 
probably our Ribble." 

But it is more especially round wells that 
superstition has gathered and lingers to this day. 
The sacred rivers of the world, cleansing the soul 
of sin and bearing it away like some foul disease, 
are many: the Ganges, best-known type of all; 
but the healing spring, often in virtue of its cura- 
tive properties, and perhaps, as connected with 
the rite of baptism, has been the most fertile 
source of long-enduring beliefs. The wise and 
tender treatment of the old nature-worship by 
the Church is notably manifest here. The name 
of madonna or saint, or the general term " holy," 
was substituted for that of the godling or spirit 
of the spring, and the several rites connected 
with water-worship maintained under thin dis- 
guises. Barbaric lustrations reappear in the sac- 
rament of baptism ; the brush once used in the 
pagan temple is dipped in " holy water," and 
sprinkles the faithful. The leprous Naaman re- 
pairing to the Jordan ; the sick waiting their turn 
to be dipped in Bethesda when the spirit " trou- 
bled " the water ; have their modern represent- 
atives in the halt, blind, dumb, and otherwise 
afflicted, who repair to St. Winifred's Well in 
pathetic hope of cure by bathing in or drinking 
of the stream. Legend tells how this burst forth 
from the spot where the head of the martyred 
saint fell, as did the triple fountain outside Rome 
when the head of the apostle Paul struck the 
earth three times. Round the altar of the chapel 



174 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

which encloses the well the sufferers kneel in 
prayer for St. Winifred's aid, and, when the festi- 
vals in her honour are held, kiss with fervour the 
reliquary that holds her bones. The crutches of 
the cured hang on the chapel pillars like votive 
offerings in classic temples, and link the worship- 
pers of to-day with the neolithic villagers who 
cast their gifts, as old writers tell, into the lakes 
of southern France and central Switzerland. 

Space allows only brief allusion to the sym- 
bolical use of water, as in " wishing-wells," " curs- 
ing-wells," and so forth. This is a department of 
that widespread activity of barbaric thought in 
what is known as " sympathetic magic," or the 
supposed vital connection between object and 
subject. Hence to this very day the betrayed 
girl or the injured man will make a rude clay im- 
age of the wrongdoer and lay it in the stream, so 
that, as it washes away under the play of the 
running water, his life may waste to its doom. Or 
his name will be scratched on a pebble and curses 
uttered against him as the stone is thrown into the 
water ; or pins will be cast in, so that, like as with 
a dagger, his heart may be pierced. Sacred trees 
are closely associated with wells, and on those 
growing near them the sick hang rags or shreds 
of clothing as vehicles for the transfer of their 
diseases. "By the intercession of the Lord, I 
leave my portion of illness on this place," is an 
old formula used by the Munster peasants. Then 
there is the great body of portents and omens 
drawn from the appearance of the water, as the 
reading of health or sickness in the ripples; the 
counting of the bubbles that break when anything 
is thrown into a mineral spring, the lovelorn reck- 
oning thereby what months or years must pass 



THE AGE OF METALS. 1 75 

before the absent one returns, or the wedding 
takes place. Of ghastly ordeals, too, water has 
been the vehicle in the throwing of suspected 
witches into it. If the poor creature sank, there 
was evidence that Satan had claimed his own ; 
sometimes by cruel irony, if she swam, there was 
evidence that the sacred stream rejected the crim- 
inal. And there is the pathetic idea of the rela- 
tion between water and death. Life, as many a 
rustic yet believes, goes out on the ebb, a super- 
stition of which Dickens makes use in the death 
scene in "David Copperfield " : when "it being 
low water, he went out with the tide." 

The subject, charged as it is with the primi- 
tive ideas of man concerning his relation to every- 
thing around him, tempts us to linger over it, and 
perhaps such examples as have been chosen out 
of many will help us to realise the continuity of 
belief and similarity of custom which have pre- 
vailed since the dawn of thought, and how the old 
persists throughout the new, because the roots of 
each are in the same soil. One of the most strik- 
ing illustrations of this is in the action of an ec- 
clesiastical council held at Durham in 1220, when 
it was ordered that the fonts were to be kept 
locked because people were in the habit of car- 
rying away the baptismal water for use in magical 
rites. Many of our mediaeval fonts show where 
the hinges and staples for the lock were formerly 
fastened. 

Besides the bracelets which have led to these 
remarks, there have been found carved and curi- 
ously shaped stones which, in the judgment of 
some writers, point to other phases of nature- 
worship. But to dwell on this would be only to 
amplify examples of the varied outward forms of 



176 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

one underlying idea. To borrow a figure from 
chemistry, we may call religions allotropic. That 
is to say, as the diamond and a piece of charcoal 
are different combinations of the atoms of the 
same substance, so religions are the same in 
essence, and vary only in the mixture. 

The wellnigh common practice of burning the 
dead in the Bronze Age was probably resorted to 
as a yet more effective way of getting rid of the 
ghost than by burial of the body, with the placing 
of heavyweights upon it, and a ring fence around 
it. Cremation seemed akin to annihilation, and 
as the connection between corpse and ghost was 
a vital one in barbaric belief, the bodiless, home- 
less spirit was less likely to be troublesome. 
While the primary object of the custom was 
doubtless to completely destroy the connection 
between body and soul, it would be especially 
adopted by nomadic peoples, who, in leaving 
their dead behind, would be unable to make 
provision for the appeasing offerings at their 
graves. Hence the burning of the body to pre- 
vent the neglected ghost from following and 
harassing the living. 

The old conception of the tomb as the home 
of the dead, however, remained. A number of 
so-called " house-urns'' have been discovered in 
various parts of Europe which, with differences 
in detail, resemble each other as receptacles for 
the ashes gathered from the funeral pyre. They 
are imitations of the beehive, oven, or roundish 
huts of primitive Indo-European type, "the walls 
of which we must imagine to be composed of 
loam, twigs, or other perishable material. The 
roof seems to have consisted of layers of straw 
or reeds, and to have been held together by ribs, 



THE AGE OF METALS. 177 

which in the real house were made of wood." In 
some of the German funeral urns the door is 
shown in the roof, having been put there in the 
original dwellings as a protection against wild 
beasts; the urns with the door in the wall repre- 
senting a later style of house. One urn is obvi- 
ously a copy of a lake-dwelling, with added or- 
namentation in the double spirals which are a 
characteristic pattern of the Bronze Age. Whole- 
some and sanitary as is cremation, it has the dis- 
advantage of preventing the preservation of arti- 
cles throwing light on the dress and habits of a 
people, but, fortunately, a few interments supple- 
ment what has been gathered already on these 
matters from the lake-dwellings of the Bronze 
Age. 

In his account of the succession of the metals, 
Schrader refers to the struggle in early times 
between gold and silver for supremacy. The 
"white" metal, as it is named in many lan- 
guages, both Aryan and non-Aryan, was for a 
long period preferred to gold, the " yellow " 
metal (root ghel, yellow), probably as less wide- 
spread, being found only in rocks, and hence 
harder to extract. The Turko-Tataric name for 
silver comes from a root meaning " to hide," 
indicating that it was difficult to get at. The 
trade routes by which it was conveyed from place 
to place are uncertain, but probably the rich 
mines of Armenia were a leading centre of dis- 
tribution both east and west. Speaking of the 
German tribes of the interior, Tacitus says that (^ 
u they prefer silver to gold, not f rom a ny speci al 
liking, but because a large" number of silver pieces"" 
is more convenient for use among dealers in 
cheap and common articles." That lead was 
12 



178 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

known before iron is shown by the results of 
Dr. Schliemann's excavations in deposits of the 
Bronze Age at Mycenae, where a good many dis- 
coveries of it were made. And that copper pre- 
ceded iron is evidenced, among other reasons, in 
the application of its name to the later metal. 
For example, the German risen, the Celtic eisarn, 
and the English iron, are all related to the Latin 
cbs, copper. The ancient Mexicans also used the 
same word for both metals. Some of the names 
given to the smiths tools show that they were 
originally of stone. Hammer is the Anglo-Saxon 
hamor, a rock, and the Greek words for " smith " 
and " smithy," are derived from the word for cop- 
per. If sideros, the Greek word for iron, is con- 
nected with aster, a star (cf. Latin sidus, a star), 
this may show, as we know to be the case among 
the Esquimaux and some other barbaric races, 
that that metal was first known in meteoric 
form, as composing a large proportion of the 
bodies falling from space, named aerolites, or 
*' air-stones." The Coptic name for iron is said 
to mean the " stone of heaven," and a like idea is 
found in the Finnish epic, the Kalevala, where 
red milk, flowing from the breasts of the Rainbow 
maidens, becomes Iron, who goes to see his broth- 
er Fire. Fire tries to devour him, but he escapes 
to the swamps, where the divine smith Ilmarinen 
captures him and makes him into " swords of 
heroes and buckles for women." Iron was smelted 
on the shores of the Black Sea and in other parts 
of the East in the time of Homer (about 850 b. c.) ; 
how much earlier than this the metal was used 
in Asia is unknown. As already stated it is 
spoken of in the Iliad and in the "Works and 
Days" of Hesiod, a poem nearly contemporary 






CONCLUSION. 179 

with the Homeric, as of rarity and value. By 
what channels the use of it spread through Eu- 
rope is not clear, but its diffusion must have been 
rapid, because when the Romans were attacked 
at the beginning of the fourth century by the 
Gauls under Brennus, they found these despised 
barbarians armed with iron swords. And although 
it is said that some of the Saxons who fought 
under Harold at the battle of Senlac in 1066 
wielded stone malls or hammers, this was probably 
due to scarcity of metal weapons. Be this as it 
may, with the appearance of iron tools and weap- 
ons the story of primitive man is ended. 

In the " Age of Iron " there is no place for 
fairies and witches. Where pieces of that metal 
are hung, they dare not venture : hence the horse- 
shoes still to be seen nailed on stable doors and 
masts of ships, although they are now considered 
as luck-bringers. Aubrey tells us that u in the 
Bermudas they used to put an Iron into the fire 
when a Witch comes in," and he adds, " Under 
the Porch of Staninfield Church, in Suffolk, I saw 
a Tile with a Horse-shoe upon it, placed there to 
keep the Witches away, though one would imagine 
that Holy Water alone would have been suffi- 
cient." 



CHAPTER VI. 

CONCLUSION. 

The foregoing outline of man's early history 
shows that his path throughout is strewn with the 
rude tools and weapons wherewith he carved and 
fought his way. And it also shows that civilisa- 



180 THE STORY OF "PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

tion retains, and, in no small degree, shares his 
primitive ideas about his surroundings. Thus the 
one tell us what he did, and the other what he 
thought. And as, under the same conditions, he 
made shift with the same stone implements, so, at 
the same level of culture, he explained like things 
in a similar way, and behaved towards them ac- 
cordingly. To the confirmation of this the habits 
and beliefs of barbaric races of to-day contribute 
much. 

In these examples, both from past and pres- 
ent, of like use of things and of like modes of 
thought, the unity of mankind is further brought 
home to us. We have not altered so much as we 
vainly think ; if the civilised part of us is recent, 
in structure and inherited tendencies we are each 
of us hundreds of thousands of years old. And 
the explanation of this is that the influences of a 
few generations, acting on us froiruwithout, are 
slight contrasted with the influences of a dateless 
past inherited from our ancestors. These ex- 
plain our mental as well as our bodily vestigial 
structures. 

But there are other facts which are not so 
easily brought home to us. i. There are the vast 
ages which separate man at his lowest, say as a 
chipper of flints in the Thames and Somme val- 
leys, from Plato and Shakspere, from Aristotle 
and Newton, or from the highest types living. 
Yet through all those ages, man, as we now know 
him, was in the process of making ; he is their 
result. 2. There are the long, monotonous ages, 
the dismal wildernesses strewn with his bones, 
before any great impulse to advance, such, for 
example, as came through knowledge of metals, 
was given. Till then, brain and hand carried 



CONCLUSION. 181 

man only a certain distance, where progress was 
arrested. Nevertheless, all the germs were there, 
and we can trace their development. From un- 
hafted stone tools and weapons to modern ma- 
chinery ; from clothes of twisted grass to modern 
fabrics ; from tattooing and shell ornaments to 
adorning with rare jewels ; from wigwams and 
mud-huts to mansion and palace ; from heap of 
burial stones to pyramid ; from cromlech to Bud- 
dhist tope and Christian cathedral ; from scratch- 
ings on bones to sculptures of Phidias and paint- 
ings of Raphael ; from twanged bow-string to 
violin of Stradivarius ; from picture-writing to 
alphabets; from signs and imitative sounds to 
rich vocabularies ; from counting on the fingers 
to reckoning in trillions ; from measuring with 
different parts of the body — foot, nail, hand, span, 
fathom — to geometry ; from " dug-out " canoe to 
Atlantic liner ; from calabash or horn and clay- 
smeared vessel to Sevres ware ; from family life 
to tribal and national unity ; from work done by 
one to division of labour — the ruler, the farmer, 
the merchant, the soldier — from coarse rites and 
bloody sacrifices to ancestors, local gods and 
nature-gods, to worship of a Supreme being ; 
from myths and such-like guesses to science and 
its certainties ; as from alchemy to chemistry ; 
and from astrology to astronomy ; these and 
aught else in numberless gradations, are the steps 
of advance by which the highest races have made 
all things their ministering servants. 

3. But there is the fact that just as the lower 
organisms remain as they were from the begin- 
ning, and have all along constituted the majority ; 
so the races which have reached a certain stage 
and have never passed beyond it far outnumber 



1 82 THE STORY OF " PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

those above them. For progress is a modern idea 
— a Western idea. The Orientals, from whom we 
may now except the Japanese, hate it. As Sir 
Henry Maine says in his "Popular Government, " 
"the entire Mohammedan world detests it. The 
multitude of coloured men who swarm in the con- 
tinent of Africa detest it. The millions on mil- 
lions of men who fill the Chinese Empire loathe 
it, and, what is more, despise it." And as Walter 
Bagehot says in his brilliant little book, " Physics 
and Politics/' " any progress is extremely rare. 
As a rule, a stationary state is by far the most 
frequent condition of man, as far as history de- 
scribes that condition; the progressive state is 
only a rare and an occasional exception." Bar- 
baric races, and, for that matter, civilised races, 
only in lesser degree, are bound hand and foot 
by custom, by taboo, by belief in luck and ill-luck 
paralysing action ; and are deterred from doing 
this or that because of supposed divine sanctions 
or prohibitions, which thus create a hedge round 
abuses, illusions, and frauds. Moreover, all men 
are mimics. Captain Palmer relates of the Fiji 
that "a chief was one day going over a mountain 
path followed by a long string of his people, when 
fre happened to stumble and fall; all the rest of 
the people immediately did the same, except one 
man, who was set upon by the rest to know 
whether he considered himself better than his 
chief!" And it is only a few years ago, among 
ourselves, when a royal personage had an affec- 
tion of the knee which caused her to walk lame, 
that " society " affected what was nicknamed 
the "Alexandra limp." That Fijian who refused 
to fall because his chief had stumbled represented 
the rare souls who have dared to suggest that such 



CONCLUSION. 183 

and such a thing may have two sides to it, and who 
have thus opened the way to inquiry wherein alone 
is the path of progress. Their fate has been the 
crucifix and the stake, or long, pining years in 
dungeons. Both vested interests and apathy have 
been the foes to advancement, so strong is the re- 
luctance to change, so great the "pain of a new 
idea"; so dominant the power of feeling over rea- 
son, of that wish to believe which demands no 
effort against that desire to know which involves 
strenuous inquiry and application. Yes; progress 
is a modern idea. We have only to think of the 
state of France before the Revolution, and of the 
barbarous condition of the Highlanders — a cen- 
tury ago ; of the state of England — three-quarters 
of a century ago — before social reforms were set 
afoot ; of the infamous penal laws in the time of 
the Georges; of the political disabilities, of the 
condition of miners and peasants down to our 
own time; we have only to think of the state of 
Russia to-day ; to learn that progress has only 
just begun in the wider and nobler meaning that 
we are attaching to the word. For the increase 
of knowledge is only an agent of advance in the 
degree that it sets people thinking about social 
questions, about the abolition of class privileges; 
about equality of chance in that struggle for life 
which becomes ever more acute. So that prog- 
ress, although too often reckoned in terms of 
expansion of trade and wealth, of inventions of 
new machinery, and of discoveries of new re- 
sources of the earth, is, happily, coming to mean 
more than these, even the disappearance of the 
artificial state which makes life hideous and hope- 
less to the many, and the creation of a public 
sentiment which shall hold the worker in honour, 



184 THE STORY OF " PRIMITIVE" MAN. 

and regard only the wilfully idle as disgraced. 
Nor this alone. The more equitable distribution 
of the means of life is an object to be further 
striven after in the degree that it contributes to 
that well-ordered use of opportunity in which 
education is the chief directing power. It is true 
that the history of both individuals and nations, 
while it in large degree explains the causes of 
growth, of arrest, and of decline, also confirms 
the lesson of man's impotence before the great 
forces of nature. " Limits we did not set condi- 
tion all we do." But within those limits there is 
such room for the play of human activity that 
the wise expenditure of this should be our chief 
solicitude. 

" No eye could be too sound 
To observe a world so vast, 
No patience too profound 

To sort what's here amass'd ; 
How man may here best live no care too great to explore." 



SELECTED LIST OF BOOKS. 

CHAPTER I. 

Darwin's Descent of Man. Murray, 6s. 

Huxley's Mans Place in Nature, etc. Macmillan, 5s. 

Clodd's Story of Creation. Longmans, 3s. 6d. 

(In The Nineteenth Century, April, 1895, Professor 
Prestwich summarises the discoveries of rudely 
worked flints on the high chalk plateaus of Kent, by 
W. B. Harrison. These point to the existence of 
pre-glacial man in Southern Britain, and, therefore, 
as removed from Palaeolithic man by the long interval 
" needed for the advance and retreat of the great ice 
stream.") 

CHAPTER II. 

Bonney's Story of our Planet. Cassell, 31s. 6d. 
Geikie's Class Book of Geology. Macmillan, 4s. 6d. 
" Text Book of Geology. " 28s. 

CHAPTERS III. AND IV. Sections 1-3. 

Allen Brown's Palaeolithic Man in North- West Middle- 
sex. Macmillan, 7s. 6d. 

Evans's Ancie7it Stone Imftle7nents. Longmans. (Out 
of print.) 

D wkins's Cave Hunting. Macmillan. (Out of print.) 
" Early Man in Britain. Macmillan, 25s. 

Joly's Man before Metals. Kegan Paul, $s. 

Lubbock's I're-Historic Times. Williams & Norgate, 
18s. 

185 



1 86 SELECTED LIST OF BOOKS. 

Stevens's Flint Chips. Bell & Sons. (Out of print.) 
Worsaae's Pre-Historic Antiquities of the North. 

Kegan Paul, 7s. 6d. 
Worthington Smith's Man the Primeval Savage. 

Stanford, 10s. 6d. 

CHAPTER IV. Sections 4-8. 

Codrington's Melanesians. Clarendon Press, 16s. 
Elton's Origins of English History. Quaritch, 20s. 
Greenwell's British Barrows* Clarendon Press, 25s. 
Huxley's Essays (vid. supra). 

Keller's Lake- Dwellings. Longmans. (Out of print.) 
Nadaillac's Pre-Historic America. Murray, 16s. 
Payne's History of America, vol. i. Clarendon Press, 

12s. 6d. 
Rhy's's Celtic Britain. S.P.C.K., 2s. 6d. 
Schrader's Pre-Historic Antiquities. Griffin, 21s. 
Spencer's Principles of Sociology, vol. i. Williams & 

Norgate, 21s. 
Taylor's Origin of the Aryans. Scott, 3s. 66. 
Tylor's Anthropology. Macmillan, 7s. 6d. 

" Primitive Culture, 2 vols. Murray, 21s. 
Clodd's Myths and Dreams. Chatto, 3s. 6d. 

CHAPTER V. 

Evans's Ancient Broiize Implements. Longmans. (Out 

of print.) 
Schrader {vid. supra). 



GENERAL INDEX. 



A. 

Ages of Stone, Bronze, and Iron, 29. 

Agriculture, 139, 154. 

Ainu, 65, 107. 

Ale, 154. 

Allen, Grant, 140. 

Altars, 116. 

Amber, 33, 86. 

America, North, copper in, 161. 

man in, 159. 

American, North, mound-builders, 

127-129. 
Ancestor-worship, no. 
Ancient Stone Age, 35. 

men of, 74. 

Animals, belief in descent from, 129. 

domestication of, 138, 149. 

Anthropoid apes, 12, 27, 70. 
Anthropology, 11. 
Apes, manlike, 12, 22. 
Aristotle, 126. 
Arrow-heads^ 85. 

superstitions about, 88, 94. 

Arts, primitive, 52. 

summary of advance of, 181. 

Aryans, 145. 

— - culture and origin of, 153. 

Asia, civilisation of, 158. 

Australian grave-posts, 70. 

Avebury, 120. 

Axes, stone, 88. 

B. 

Barbaric ideas about dreams, 105. 

ornament, 57. 

Barrows, 87, 97, 101, 109. 

Beech, 149. 

Black Stone at Mecca, 119. 

Blood-brothers, 155. 

Boat, primitive, 150. 

Bones, scarcity of human, 56. 

Boucher des Perthes, 35. 



Boundary stones, 119. 
Bourgeois, Abbe, 48. 
Boyd Dawkins, 40, 99. 
Brain, differences cf, 13, 19. 
Brandon, 39. 
Brehon Laws, 156. 
Britain, Palaeolithic, 41. 

united to the Continent, n. 

Bronze, 163. 

Age of, 32. 

methods of casting, 164. 

ornamentation of, 165. 

Burial-places, 77, 99, 101, 103. 
Burning of dead, 103, 176. 
Bushmen, 70. 



Caesar, to. 

Caddington, 38. 
Cairn, 97. 

Cakes, funeral, in. 
Campbell, 98. 
Canoes, 67, 136. 
Carnac, 124, 126. 
Cattle as money, 150. 
Caverns, 42. 

deposits in, 47. 

formation of, 42. 

range of, 48. 

remains in, 42, 100. 

Cells, body, 12. 

Celts (implements), 83, 162, 165. 

(race), 99, 172. 

Cereals, 144, 152. 

Chimpanzee, 12, 26. 

Chipped Flints, manufacture of, 31. 

Ciicular barrows, 101. 

Civilisation, stages of, 139. 

Coast-finds, 86, 94. 

Cooking, primitive, 50, 74. 

Copper, Age of, 32. 

, discovery of, 161. 



187 



i88 



GENERAL INDEX. 



Coronation Stone, 119. 
Corpse, devices to prevent return of, 
112. 

, food for, 109, in. 

Crannoges, 131. 
Cremation, 103, 176. 
Cromlechs, 87, 117, 126. 
Cursing-wells, 174. 
Cyprus, 162. 

D. 

Darwin^ 26. 

Dead, disposal of, 72, 125, 

feasts of, 109, in. 

worship of, 117, 141. 

Death, barbaric ideas of, 116. 
Diana, Grove of, 151. 
Diodorus Siculus, 72. 
Disease, barbaric ideas of, 114. 
Dog, 95, 154. 
Dogger Bank, 42. 
Dolmens, 87, 117, 127. 
Domesticated animals, 149. 
Domestication of animals, 138. 
Dordogne, caves of, 45, 54, 143. 
Dreams, barbaric notions of, 104. 
Dress, primitive, 69, 74. 
Drift-implements, 39. 
Drowning, 172. 
Druids, 166. 
Dryopithecus, 21. 
Duruthy cave, 57. 
Dwellings, primitive, 68. 



Ealing, chipped flints at, 38, 48. 

Earth-mother, 141. 

Eastward position, 125. 

Elf-shot, 87, 89. 

Elton, 142. 

Embalming, 133. 

Eocene System, 22. 

Europe, changes in, ti, 23, 25, 76, 96. 

forests of, 161. 

Evans, Sir John, 30, 93. 
Evolution of art and science, 181. 



Fairy millstones, 87. 
Families, grouping of, 155. 

primitive, 70. 

Father, power of, 155. 

Feasts (see Funeral). 

Fire, discovery of, 49. 

— — modes of producing, 49. 

Flint cores, 40. 

flakes, 39. 



Flints, chipped, 31. 

Fonts, locked, 175. 

Funeral cakes, in. 

— — feasts, 72, 1 10, 112. 

Future life, primitive ideas of, 103. 

rank in, no. 

G. 

Galton, 139. 

Gibbon, 12, 14. 

Gildas, 170. 

Gold, 161. 

Gorilla, 12, 26. 

Grasping organs, 16. 

Grave, customs at, 108. 

Gray's Inn Lane, chipped flint in, 

10, 37. 
Greeks, 158. 
Gun flints, manufacture of, 39. 

H. 

Hand, power of human, 14. 
Herodotus, 132. 
Hesiod, 32, 178. 
Holed dolmens, 113, 115. 
Holes in barrows, 109. 
Holy water, 109. 
Homer, 32, 178. 
Horseshoes, 179. 
Husband, power of, 155. 
Hut circles, 99, 117. 
Huxley, 26, 59. 

I. 

Iberians, 98. 

Ice Age, 25, 32. 

Icklingham, 39. 

Im Thurn, Everard, 106. 

India, Further, chipped flints from 

22. 
Indo-European languages, 145. 
Infanticide, 72, 155. 
Iron, 178. 

Age of, 32. 

dread of, 179. 

myths about, 160, 178. 



J. 



Jagannath, 119. 
Jet, 86. 
Johnson, Dr., 9. 

K. 

Kalevala, 178. 
Keller, Dr., 131. 
Keramic, 50. 
Kitchen middings, 95. 



GENERAL INDEX. 



189 



Lake dwellers, origin of, 143. 
Lake-dwellings, 132, 168. 
Ages of, 136, 142. 

remains of, 136. 

Land, property in, 156. 
Landor, A. H. Savage, 100. 
Language, 15, 17. 

and race, 148. 

Law and Religion, 156. 
Lea valley, flints in, 38. 
Lemurs, 12. 
Life, future, 103. 
Limbs, primitive, 14. 
Lockyer, J. Norman, 125. 
Long barrows, 102. 
Lubbock, Sir John, 31. 
Lucky stones, 125. 
Lucretius, 30. 

M. 
MacEnery, Rev. J., 46. 
Mammals, 12. 
Mammoth, 25, 76. 

Period, 48. 

pictures of, 55. 

Manlike apes, 12, 2r. 
Man, " Primitive," 60. 
erect posture of, 15. 

incarnation of, as tree-spirit, 

151. 

original home of, 26. 

remains of. 52. 

scarclcy of bones of, 55. 

Many-celled animals, 12. 
Marriage, 155. 

primitive, 70. 

Mecca, " Black Stone" at, 119. 

Menhirs, 117, 127. 

" Mesolithic " Age, 82. 

Metals, discovery of, 160. 

Mimicry, 182. 

Miocene System, 22, 48. 

"jMiolithic " Age, 82. 

Missing link (?) between man and 

apes, 13. 
Mommsen, 126, 156. 
Money, 150. 
Monkeys, 12. 

Monuments, earth and stone, 101. 
Mound-builders, 127-129. 
Mycenae, 178. 

N. 
Nature-worship, 169. 
Neolithic or Newer Stone Age, T72. 
date of, 32. 



Neolithic or Newer Stone Age, re- 
mains of, 80. 

races, 96, 98. 

North American art, 73. 

mound-builders, 127-129. 

North Sea, 41. 
Nuraghe, 126. 

O. 

Oak, sacred, 124, 152. 
Odyssey, 157. 

Old Stone Age {see Palaeolithic). 
One-celled animals, 12. 
Orang outang, 12. 
Oracles, trees as, 151. 
Organs, grasping, 14. 
Orientation, 125. 
Ornamentation, primitive, 57. 
Other self, the, 107. 
Oval implements, 39. 
Oyster, 96. 

P. 

Palaeolithic Age, 35-75. 

man, 60-75. 

bodily and mentally, 60, 61. 

socially, 65. 

Peat bogs, 86. 

Perigord caves, relics of art in, 52. 

Phoenicians, 158, 163. 

Pile-dwellings, 77, 86. 

Pit-dwellings, 99. 

Pixy's grindstones, 87. 

Plants, spirit of, 141. 

worship of, 150. 

Pleistocene System, 24. 
Pliny, 153. 
Pliocene System, 23. 
Plough, primitive, 152. 
Po valley, 143. 
Pompeii, 164. 
Pottery, invention of, 50. 

primitive, 95, 100, 134. 

Pre-historic times, n. 
Primary Epoch, 20. 
Primates, 12, 13, 16, 18. 
Property, 156. 
Protoplasm, 12. 
Purchase of wives, 155. 
Pytheas, 154. 

Q. 

Quaternary Epoch, 24. 

R. 
Race and language, 148. 
continuity of, 78, 144. 



190 



GENERAL INDEX. 



Rags on trees, 174. 
Rank in future life, no. 
Refuse-heaps, 86, 95, 96. 
Reindeer Period, 47. 

picture of, 54. 

Return of dead, dread of, 112. 

Rhys, Prof., 163. 

River-drift, 40. 

River-gods, 170. 

Rivers, rate of lowering of beds of, 

41. 
Rollright stones, 122. 
Romans, 157. 
Round barrows, 103. 

S. 
St. Winifred's Well, 173. 
Savages, modern, 85. 
Sea ghosts, 191. 

gods, 171. 

Seasons, 149. 
Secondary Epoch, 20. 
Seeds on graves, 140. 
Senlac, battle of, 179. 
Shell mounds, 94. 
Sickness, primitive ideas of, 114. 
Silbury Hill, 101. 
Silver, 177. 

Simpson, William, 113, 115. 
Skull, Canstadt, 58 ; Engis, 59 ; Ne- 
anderthal, 59 ; Spy, 59, 60. 
Skulls, measurement of, 97. 

of vertebrates, 13. 

Sloane Museum, 9. 

Social life, early, 70, 74, 155. 

Somme valley, 35, 41, 143. 

Soul, primitive ideas of, 105. 

Spindle-whorls, 86, 100. 

Springs, healing, 173. 

Stanley, Dean, 34. 

Stone Age, Older and Newer, 35, 76. 

continuity of, 79. 

Stonehenge, 120, 121. 
Stone circles, 120, 125^ 

implements, shaping of, 31. 

structures, 117. 

Stones, anointing of, 118. 

as abode of spirits, 118. 

legends about, 118, 122. 



Stones, worship of, 118, 119. 

Strabo, 155. 

Struggle for life, 73. 

Sun-worship, 125. 

Survivals in customs and dress, 34, 

35- 
Swiss lake-dwellings, 134. 



Tacitus, 75, 100, 149, 177. 

Talayots, 126. 

Tasmanians, 33, 49, 66. 

Tattooing, 58. 

Temples, primitive, 150. 

Terminal stones, 120. 

Tertiary Epoch, 20. 

Thames valley, man in, 10, 37, 143. 

Thenay flints, 22, 36, 48. 

Thucydides, 154. 

Thumb, power of, 14. 

Thunderbolts, 87. 

Tin, 163. 

Tobacco, sacrificial use of, 128. 

Toe for grasping, 15. 

Tomb model of house, 103, 116, 176. 

Totem, 130, 142. 

Tree-spirit, 151. 

Trees, belief in descent from, 129. 

oracles from, 151. 

Tschudes, 163. 
Tumuli, 77, S7, 101, 102. 



Vertebrates, 12, 14. 

W. 

Waggon, primitive, 150. 

Wallace, A. R., 27. 

Water and witches, 113, 175. 

worship of, 169. 

Weapons, pointed, 39. 

Weaving, 138. 

Weeding-out of races, 72. 

Wishing-wells, 174. 

Wives, capture and purchase of, 155. 

Worship of ancestors, no ; of stones, 

118 ; of trees, 151 ; of water, 169. 
Writing, primitive, 101. 



IDA MC 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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029 714 091 7 



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